Emiliano Grilli wrote: >venerd?, 15 ottobre 2004 alle 00:01:21, MarC ha scritto: > > >>I was looking also for a sound card for audio, well supported in Linux >>(specially under Demudi), >>so I really apreciated your comments. >> >>However I've got some more questions which I state below: >> >> > >(cut) > > > >>I must say first that I'm an ignorant about technical sound issues (but >>I have some knowledge about electronics and spectral analysis so I >>should be able to learn it some day...). This explains the nonesenses >>and atrocities that I may have written below.... >> >>For my case, I guess that I should try Delta 44 as I don't use digital >>I/O. >> >> > >I would choose that only if I really needed 4 inputs and 4 outputs usable >at the same time, otherwise I would check the audiophile. > >Consider also that with a multi I/O card you want to have a mixer with >direct outputs per channel or at least inserts or groups (eg a way to route >4 indipendent audio channels from the mixer) - and this is a feature that >will rise the price of the mixer... > > > I take notes of it. I though I could do without the mixer and have multiple input ( useful for some elemental drums recording or parallel processed realtime voice+guitar). But as I see, as I don't run on a good budget and what I need is to record guitar and voice (which can be done one after the other), I prefer to record one track in good quality in spite of recording 4 karaokes at the same time... I took a look to the "Midiman/M-Audio Audiophile 2496" and seems perfect for me. (if anybody else is interested, I found a good review in http://www.digit-life.com/articles/maudioaudiophile/) Thank you. Anyway, as you said I'm going to first learn how to tweak jack for my Audigy and get a mixer. >>Now I'm ""working"" with a Creative Audigy card and I want to buy a new >>one basically because Audigy doesn't allow realtime monitoring through >>jack (the latency is at least 45ms and for me is too much) and because >>I want to have a good dynamic response to record my acoustic guitar >>(now it saturates the input or I must record at a low volume with a lot >>of noise). >> >> > >Very strange that you cannot achieve better performance... I don't know the >audigy, but with a crappy sb128 on athlon 800 w 256Mb ram I can get >with "reasonably few" xruns to 23 ms and even to 11 (i speak of the values >reported by qjackctl) - I suspect that your problem comes from not having >an external mixer for conveniently routing of inputs and outputs and for >monitoring what you are playing. > >Could also be a problem of a not enough powerful pc? > > it's not a problem of the pc: 2.6Ghz, 512Mb ram it's a problem of *me* configuring it... :( as Free knows, I already suspected that I had some problems with my jack configuration so this comments are the definite proof of it. Indeed, I *could* configure qjackctl with a latency of 23ms(periods: 2, frames: 512 ): but I when I used Ardour I got some problems like the sound getting cut sometimes, it hanged often, strange inicialization errors, etc. Also I though that I shouldn't allow any "xrun" and I disabled "Soft Mode". Now I see I "must" allow "xruns" but what criteria do I follow? how much "xruns" can be allowed? And finally, to tweak jack configuration, I ignore if it can be useful to change other parameters. Now I only play with "periods" and "frames", and I don't know the exact influence of the parameters: "Start Delay"(why jack has an initial delay?) and "Timeout"(of what? it sounds the same than latency...). I didn't found docs about jack about these issues... Does anybody know? Should I try the jackit user list or it is too technical? If there isn't documents on these questions, when I'll finish, I'll try to write it down and make a "beginner's" doc. Also I think that it should be a place where the people could post their experiences in different sound cards in linux and their jack configurations under different environments. This should make our life easier... >The cards I mentioned have all a "direct monitoring" feature, that will >bypass the software, so in this they are better... but you definately need >a mixer to enjoy these cards. > >I would for now try to exploit the audigy (I'm sure it can do better), and >buy the mixer in first place, then the soundcard. > > > >>This could be a good option for what I'm searching for? Should I buy >>any other external hardware to record acoustic guitar without >>saturating the input? I'm always affraid of external mixers or >>amplifiers as they are very expensive and add noise to my signal. >>Anyone can help me destroy this myth? >> >> > >There are micro mixers (behringer for example) with 6 channels (2 with >phantom power) starting around 75 euro, as usual, the more you can spend, >the better the result (good mixers are makie and soundcraft, for example) - >but those micro mixers are handy and not very expensive for what they offer. > > > ok. again, great thanks. >>[for the electric guitar I currently use an expression pedal which >>outputs "line level" -> it goes through a Red Box Pro (DI) -> I connect >>it to the "mic input" but for the acoustic guitar I only have a mic >>output and I cannot go through the red box...] >> >> > >I wouldn't connect anything than a mic to the "mic input", instead use the >"line input", you should get better results with line level signals (which >I suppose is what is coming from your guitars). > >The best you can do is a condenser microphone (samson are cheap) to record >the acoustic guitar "thru the air" (here enters the pc noise, too, if you >are in the same room ;). > > > I hope it will have some directivity (at leat 180 degrees) to avoid the noise of the PC... I'm going to take a look at the "samson". >>And finally, 24 bits are enough?I guess it may influence in the range >>of different volumes that you can record (-> to solve the saturation >>problems with my records of acoustic guitar) >> >> > >It's good (I often use 16 bit, because I don't do too much editing and for >distributing sounds you always have to resample to 16 bit) >Consider that with 16 bit you get 65536 possible values, with 24 you get >16777216 for each sample - so is really best, but a bit unpratical - >especially in home productions... > >Having more "bits" if I understand correctly helps you when you do lots of >transformations to the sound, where with less bits you get a greater loss >of information (but here I can be wrong) > > fine, as I see dynamical range is an affair of the sound card input. > > >>great thanks in advance! >> >> > >HTH ciao > > Cheers.
