Getting good sound input

Getting good sound input

[Joe T.]

Hello
Im currently using an ESS1869 soundcard on Slackware7
with the OSS kernel modules.
Im trying to get some input from a cassette to wav,
but i'm having a lot of difficulty.

I've tried using sox, kwave, sound-recorder and
cat /dev/audio or /dev/dsp > blah.au.

When i record from the input port, i get nothing.
When i record from the mic port, it sounds horrid.

Does anyone know what the problem could be and how to
solve it?  Are there any special modules in the kernel
I have to enable to get good input sound?

I used this card with freebsd and the commercial OSS
drivers. Using Sound Studio, I was able to get perfect sound..

==Joe Topjian
auximini@yahoo.com
http://auximini.cjb.net

Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day

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Re: Getting good sound input

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Joe T. on April 29, 2000, at 11:32]

Hi:

>When i record from the input port, i get nothing.

Use "aumix -q" to see which of your input channels are set to "P" (play only)
and and which are set to "R" (play and record). If an input channel is set to
"P", then you'll hear it out of the speakers, but you won't be able to record
from it. If it's set to "R", then you'll be able to do both.

My guess is that your "line in" is set to "P". You can change it with a command
like "aumix -l R" (case is significant).

>When i record from the mic port, it sounds horrid.

The default in Linux is to use 8-bit sound, which intorduces a lot of low-level
distortion because the granularity is just too low. Using basic commands like
"cat" or "cp" will most definitely use the default, so they're not the best way
to go. Use a command which lets you specify the sample size, and use at least
16 bits.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 856 Grenon Avenue | I believe that the Bible is the
Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario   | Word of God. Please contact me
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Re: Getting good sound input

[Joe T.]

Yep .. that was basically it.
After I posted, I checked some archives of this
mailing list, read up on aumix and tried it.
works perfect now  :)

thanks

==Joe Topjian
auximini@yahoo.com
http://auximini.cjb.net

Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day

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Re: Getting good sound input

[Britton]

On Sat, 29 Apr 2000, Joe T. wrote:

> Hello
> Im currently using an ESS1869 soundcard on Slackware7
> with the OSS kernel modules.
> Im trying to get some input from a cassette to wav,
> but i'm having a lot of difficulty.
> 
> I've tried using sox, kwave, sound-recorder and
> cat /dev/audio or /dev/dsp > blah.au.

I don't know about kwave, but the little play and record things that come
with sox have aweful quality.  I don't know for sure why but I'd guess
poor real time coding, as both bplay/brec and my own concoction
rawrec/rawplay (which I will be releasing for alpha test shortly) get much
better quality.  sound-recorder has, according to it's own documentation,
poor quality due to bad buffering.  'cat'ing from /dev/audio will probably
suffer from the same problem.

> When i record from the input port, i get nothing.

Make sure your mixer settings are reasonable.

> When i record from the mic port, it sounds horrid.

The mic is probably going to sound awful without careful setting of the
input gain, and pretty terrible even then.  PC mics are incredibly cheezy,
and they typically sit beside the computer and suck in all kinds of fan
noise.  This should be partly fixable with a simple ADALINE, it may well
be that sound studio is doing something like that for mic recording and
not bothering to tell you.

> Does anyone know what the problem could be and how to
> solve it?  Are there any special modules in the kernel
> I have to enable to get good input sound?

The problem is almost certainly not the kernel drivers.

> I used this card with freebsd and the commercial OSS
> drivers. Using Sound Studio, I was able to get perfect sound..
> 
> ==> Joe Topjian
> auximini@yahoo.com
> http://auximini.cjb.net
> 
> Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Talk to your friends online and get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.
> http://im.yahoo.com/

Britton Kerin