On 1/13/09, Peter Pankonin <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings... > > I am using an HP Pavilion dv4000 laptop for music performance (running > Mandriva 2008.1, jack, qsynth, M-audio Axiom 61, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, > etc.), but I'm finding that my internal sound card is way too > noisy...there is a noticeable hiss and a high-pitched whine (actually, > in order to use the laptop at all I have to bypass the ground plug on > the power supply. If I plug in the ground, it makes quite an awful > buzzing noise). > > Is anyone using something like an M-Audio Fast Track or Fast Track Pro > as an external sound card? I tried both and couldn't seem to get my > laptop to use either of them as the system audio device. It recognized > them (lsusb showed them as "midiman") but I couldn't get the sound to > come out of them instead of the onboard speakers. > > ...or does some company make a decent quality external USB sound card > that works with linux? I've seen cheap ones in computer stores but > have never had a chance to try one out? And, again, how does one > configure such a device in Linux? Thanks much. >
First, what do you mean by "High Quality" ? Second, what are your needs for input/output/sampling rates? I use the HeadRoom Total BitHead which is a "High Quality External USB Sound Card" but it has no inputs. It is plug and play with every OS I've tried: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux. I haven't tried Windows, but I imagine there would be a driver download involved for that OS. http://www.headphone.com/products/headphone-amps/the-mobile-line/headroom-total-bithead.php It is a really nice device, esp. if you are driving high impedance headphones, and need a portable headphone amp with or without a PC. Third, welcome to the wild world of sound on Linux! I'm sure the device is supported (if not, upgrade to Mandriva 2009.1, or if you aren't tied to Mandriva, perhaps Ubuntu Studio.) What likely has happened is that your system sees two sound cards now and doesn't know what to do with them until you tell it! The learning curve for getting audio configured properly on Linux is pretty steep, and often involves a lot of command-line work in my experience (perhaps only because I prefer it that way.) Some notes on Mandriva support of the fasttrack pro: http://ardour.org/node/744 A very long series of steps to get the fasttrack working on Ubuntu: Google cache (since ubuntu forums seems to be down) http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:2NddLyg11_YJ:ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-769822.html+http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php%3Ft%3D769822&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=ca&client=firefox-a Original link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=769822 If you are going to be doing much work with audio on Linux, I would suggest getting familiar with a few things, Jack being one of them: http://linux-sound.org/knowing-jack.html -Mark C. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
