Topic: Intercepting output audio of DAW and routing it back into Windows?

I feel like this should be possible but I've been scratching my head trying to figure it out.

I'm on Win10, using a UCX.

I want to route the output audio of my DAW (Reaper) in real time to my windows 10 system audio, so that it's recognised by Windows.  I don't want to hear it, I just want Windows to know it's there so it can be used to trigger certain things like display visualisers, light arrays, etc.  (Yes, first world problem I know.)  All of that audio reactive triggering software works when playing sound in Windows outside of Reaper, and none of it works with sound coming straight out of Reaper.

I understand why that is.  The whole point of the stability that an interface like this offers is that it completely bypasses all that sub-par windows audio handling and goes straight from the DAW to the hardware output, but isn't there some software/totalmix trick I can use that will intercept the signal in between the output of Reaper, and the analog stereo outputs of the UCX that Reaper is routed to, and mirror that signal back to windows? Where I can then hopefully mute the playback, but still have Windows register it?

Minor latency of the mirrored signal isn't an issue, neither is sound quality, as I'll still be listening to the direct output from the DAW, but the original DAW signal should NOT be affected, and I shouldn't have to insert another piece of software to do the buffering inside of my DAW (which is the voicemeter solution), as that introduces potential performance compromises that I'm not willing to contend with. 

I've tried voicemeter but it works by making you switch from the fireface driver in your DAW, to their own driver, which then routes itself through the RME driver... when I do this the buffer size changes, it isn't being controlled by the RME settings software anymore, and this concerns me.  Doesn't feel like a rock solid solution for day to day music production.

There's a voxengo plugin you can insert at the end of the daw signal chain that converts the audio to a windows MME signal in realtime.  This kind of works, but seems to effect performance, and I can't figure out how to mute the signal it's putting out, but still have windows register it.

Ideally I'd like a way to do this within totalmix, or totalmix + a third party software.

Any ideas?

Re: Intercepting output audio of DAW and routing it back into Windows?

Create WDM devices in driver settings and in Windows Sound settings use of of the devices as Windows default sound device.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13

Re: Intercepting output audio of DAW and routing it back into Windows?

In totalmix, click settings on your main output and toggle the Loopback button on. The DAW output will be available on the corresponding Windows input, ie if your main output is AN 1/2, the audio will be available on Analog 1+2 in Windows.