What's the
deal with the IGain setting, and how can I set things up
properly to avoid the "tremolo overload"?
If it's anything like the SB Live, try setting the IGain to 1 out of 100, ie
not zero but as low as possible. I think these cards have a really nasty
pre-amp, but setting this value to zero switches off the input.
With IGain set to 1 (using the cursor keys in aumix I think) you can get a
good recorded sound with the SBLive. The problem that lead me to discover
this was distortion on recordings from an external mixer, even though the
external mixer output level was set to a reasonable range using the on-board
VU meters.
An ALSA-compatible mixer (eg alsamixer) will give you more control over the
soundcard than the KDE mixer, which is usually an OSS mixer I think.
Sometimes not all of the controls in alsamixer will work on your card, which
can confuse matters. We've found aumix (an OSS mixer I think) gives us
control over the variables which matter, presumably via the OSS emulation
layer.
Cheers
Daniel