Occasionally I go to Yahoo chat rooms where a group of people play music. To play music I press the talk button and then play music from the speakers into the microphone. However, other people in the room play music through their sound card which allows them to type a message at the same time, and the sound quality is better. Can you tell me how to play from the sound card? The computer is running Windows XP.

The way people play music using their sound card is by connecting the output of the headphone socket on the computer to the microphone (or line-in) socket of the sound card. This is a pretty simple operation and all you need is an audio cable with a male 3.5mm plug on each end. One end of the cable plugs into the headphone socket (the source of the audio) and the other into the microphone socket (destination of the audio). All the computer cares about is the source coming into the microphone socket is audio, so the fact that we are actually sending the audio stream from the speakers back into the sound card is transparent to the computer, as it just thinks it’s a microphone. However, the fundamental problem with this setup is you will be unable to monitor the sound being played to the chat room, since when you have something plugged into the headphone socket the sound card generally mutes the speakers. However, some sound cards have a setting which will allow you to un-mute the speakers when headphones are plugged-in. This will depend on your sound card. Another problem with the setup is any sound which comes from your speakers (such as Windows system sounds) will also be outputted and you have no way of knowing what sounds are being played because you cannot hear the audio, unless you can un-mute the speakers. A final problem and probably a reason why it is not a good idea to undertake such a procedure, is you could possibly overload your sound card if the output of the speaker socket is too great for the input of the microphone socket. In many cases the procedure will successfully work, but I am very reluctant to recommend you try without knowing the particulars of your sound card (e.g. make and model). So, I would say you should stick with your current method of playing music, since this is obviously the least hassle. If any other readers have suggestions for different methods of accomplishing this goal, I would be very interested to hear from you. All readers should also be aware of the legal implications of replaying copyrighted works, which should be thoroughly investigated before doing any tasks which may breach the copyright.