16 Jun
2003
16 Jun
'03
7:03 a.m.
hi joseph !
nice to see you back :)
Joseph Zitt wrote:
Stepping gingerly back into the pond...
I have a desktop Mandrake 9.1 system, on which I'd like to do rather
simple audio stuff (nothing particularly audiophile or
performance-oriented for now). It has an onboard soundcard which plays
sufficiently well, but records quite badly, with most things that I
record from cassettes and the occasionaly DAT distorting quite badly.
if by "distortion" you mean "bad sound quality", you're out of
luck, but
if you really mean it's distorted as in "clipping", you might just have
a level problem, which can be fixed.
first of all, make sure your external cassette or dat deck is plugged
into "line-in", not "mic".
google tells me mandrake 9.1 has alsa as default sound system.
do "arecord -f cd | aplay" in a console window or xterm. what it does is
record in cd quality, and pipe it through to aplay any play it back.
this will give dropouts, but it's good enough for testing.
turn on your cassette deck.
now run "alsamixer" on the command line, and check for a control fader
like "capture". set it as low as possible and check if the distortion
disappears. play around with other controls and see if they change
something. as a general rule, mute all inputs you don't use to reduce noise.
if it distorts even when the capture fader is all the way down, try to
reduce the output level of the tape deck (if possible).
I
have a Roland UA-30 USB Audio device, but so far I've found that
plugging it in when the system is running crashes the machine
completely, and that the machine fails to finish booting when I boot it
up with the device already hooked in.
if you have the time to investigate some more, the alsa people would
surely appreciate a bug report. takashi iwai has been very active with
usb support lately, and besides being a really nice guy, he is very
quick to respond.
Is it worthwhile getting another soundcard? Would
something as simple
and inexpensive as a Soundblaster 16 PCI be sufficient?
um-yes-maybe. if your quality demands are "home-use", then yes.
I'm not all that sure what software I have running
at the deep level,
since I've installed enough stuff that has pulled in other things via
dependency catching in urpmi that I'm not clear, for example, on whether
I'm using ALSA or not. For the user-end apps, I've been using Audacity
and Gnusound to record and edit and XMMS for most playback.
lsmod (as root) is your friend here. and if alsa is running, you will
find a /proc/asound directory.
hope that helps,
jörn
--
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from
the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of any state, or in any other manner
inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
-- Charter of the United Nations, Article 2.4
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Kurfürstenstr 49, 45138 Essen, Germany
http://spunk.dnsalias.org (my server)
http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/ (Linux Audio Developers)