Keyboard volume control, moving to different sound card?

[Basil]

I am using my PC for amateur radio, and one form of communications is digital modes. To this end my transmitter has an on board sound card, USB driven from software on my PC. This means i have two sound cards, in effect, the on board sound card, on the motherboard , a Realtek HD Audio, and the sound card within the transmitter, which Windows XP pro sees as "USB Audio Codec". I want to make the keyboard + and - buttons for volume control effect the USB Audio Codec sound card, not the on board Realtek card's volume. If that isn't possible is there a workaround to have a volume control always on top in Windows, by some registry tweak or whatever? Thanks. Oh, the keyboard is an old Trust 16365 wireless one. I would change the keyboard if it gave me the option to control the none "on board" sound card...

[xpclient]

From the Sound Control Panel, Audio tab, what does setting the "Default device" in the Playback section to "USB Audio Codec" and then checking the option "Use only default devices" do? Or if you want to use a tool that adds "Always on top" to the window menu of every dialog/window, use this: http://www.abstractpath.com/powermenu/ and right click the title bar of the Volume control panel.

[Basil]

Hi xpclient, the always on top add on is working fine, very useful, will install on my other PC's, thanks very much for that!

If i make the USB sond card in the TX dominant I *THINK* there may be an issue with Windows sounds entering the transmitter when something fires off a sound when I am transmitting digital stuff. I am sure i read a warning somewhere. I'll try it though, I have an app called QuikMix that allows sound settings to be saved and recalled alter. Personally i think Windows does not handle sound card set up very elegantly at all, especially USB stuff. In fact it doesn't handle USB stuff itself very well at all

Again, many thanks for taking the time to reply and link to the application!

[Tripredacus]

From what I understand, XP doesn't really support multiple sound cards anyways. I had set up a PC with multiple sound cards once (for a total of 4) but it wasn't possible using XP32. I was only able to do it with XP 64bit. This was before Vista came out, so I don't know about newer OSes. Even so I got it to work, neither Microsoft, Realtek or Creative supported such a configuration.