On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Forrest Cahoon wrote:
> What sound card is the best for recording?
...
> I'm thinking of just getting a new card, but which one?
Hehe... been looking for the answer to this one for a looong time... in
short, I don't think there's an easy answer (but would _love_ for someone to
prove me wrong); check out this good netnews posting:
<http://x2.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=323713887>
Incidentally, the author of that post is on this list, and has said that he
couldn't get full duplex on that card to work with all software. The best
page for sound info under Linux is at
<http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_soundapps.html> and has links to
several sound driver projects.
I think the basic problem with sound right now is that the free sound driver
that comes with Linux has limitations for which you have to buy the
non-free, commercial driver to correct. There are some projects to write
high-performance--and free--drivers, listed at that page above. But they're
all in alpha stages. I've concluded that GNU/Linux sound support is in its
infancy. Yea, there's a ton of cool programs but there are big problems with
almost all of them, as well as problems with the underlying sound drivers.
My solution 3 years ago was to get a GUS PnP Pro, which was a great card and
had great support by way of the Linux Ultrasound Project (which is now
defunct, and the author is working on a free high-performance sound driver
for linux). Recently I just bought a TB Malibu which seemed to have a good
price/perf ratio (see post above).
> Special bonus question: what's the best way to generate a sound sample
> from an analog source to put on a web page.
When I recorded my 4-track creations to disk, I used "ultrarec," which is
basically an ultrasound variation of the standard "brec" program. Record
using Red Book CD audio specs: 44.1KHz, stereo, 16-bit, and you should be
fine. I recorded raw audio in that format first, which I burned onto CD-R;
you can use the sox program to convert that into other formats, like wav
etc. I put two formats on the Web: mp3, which is near-cd-quality but doesn't
take up tons of disk space (it takes up a lot, but not as much as raw cd
audio); you also have to use a not-completely-free program to encode the mp3
file. The second format I used was RealAudio, which everybody seems to use
but doesn't take up nearly as much space. I only put a few songs in
RealAudio though, becuase the sound quality is worthless. And I won't be
using RealAudio in the future, because its a non-free format, so instead
I'll probably make a couple samples available in .au, .wav or .aiff.
hth,
m
Michael Stutz . http://dsl.org/m/ . copyright disclaimer etc
[EMAIL PROTECTED] : finger for pgp : http://dsl.org/copyleft/
