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)
