I am confussed concerning ASIO and SoundBlaster cards being used with Audacity. Reading through the post review of sound card I saw references to sound cards not working that are ASIO. Maybe a wrong assumption but I thought all SBs are ASIO. I searched the forum for SB posts and saw where members use them, including myself - SB Live 24bit.
I have been looking into purchasing XtremeGamer but the CL website specs says ASIO 2.0 support for and lists various bit levels and sampling rates
I’ve not got an XtremeGamer to test, but I expect that it will work.
Many SB cards support ASIO, but they usually (probably always) have standard Windows drivers (WDM) as well (included on the installation disk)
To use Audacity you will need to install the Windows Drivers.
Chuck, since you are mainly transcibing a wall of LPs why are you looking at a soundcard which is primarily designed for producing output sounds for gaming?
Steve uses the UCA-202 and I use the Edirol UA-1EX - both work well. I chose the Edirol over the Behringer UCA device because I wanted hardware gain controls on the device (plus I wanted to digital input for transcribing Minidiscs).
I have received so much help from a lot of wonderful people. I want to do what I can to contribute and went to “Help us with” and downloaded a nightly build to be a beta tester.
a nightly build will make you an alpha tester - and that’s living on the sharp edge.
Some of the Alphas are good (I’m still regularly testing on a May one which had an experimental fix for a Timer Recording bug) and some can exhibit some buggy behaviour.
So if you do use Alphas for production work just be sure to make plenty of backups that you can go back to if necessary
I regularly use the Mac nightlies for my ongoing LP transcription project and have little to complain about, given the feature set I exercise in that project. The Audacity project has pretty much been in bug-fix mode since April, with some exceptions. You will note in your alpha build the presence of a “Sync Lock” button in the Edit Toolbar, and sync-lock indicators in the Track Control Panels. The Sync-lock feature not documented in the manual. Significant bug fixes include faster VST processing, much better automatic crash recovery, and improved handling of custom Equalization effect curves.
I’m certainly missing some things here (sorry, Gale!), but just wanted to give you a heads up from another alpha tester.
IMO 1.3.13-alpha is superior to 1.3.12-beta in many respects.
WC - I just did a quick review of both and I am going to look read-study them both.
The refurbished Gamer had better specs than anything else in the price range as to audio and I was looking for PCI (not express). For listening I like the CL EAX that is with my SB Live. Comfort of familiarity.
What to use for playback? I do not like Windows Media Player
Before this thread, I read the thread about sound cards started by Steve but I had not seen them on websites selling sound cards. I thought they were not marketed in the US. But the websites on which I found them showed they are and carried at musician businesses (so they must be high quality).
Beta tester…maybe I am in over my head (way over) and should have open and tried first before posting. I do want to contribute in some way.
While EAX can be enjoyable and fun when playing games or just listening to music, it can be a disadvantage when recording. Unless you remember to completely disable EAX when you are recording and editing/mixing you can get a completely false idea of what your Audacity project really sounds like. For example if you record something that you want to put on CD, it may sound wonderful on the computer (because of EAX) but then sound rubbish when you play the CD on your music system (no EAX). What you need to do to avoid that situation is to completely disable EAX (and all other effects) while recording and editing and make the recording sound wonderful without EAX, then the CD should sound just as good.
It depends on what you want. Foobar2000 is pretty lightweight but supports virtually all known audio formats. It also has basic library features, very good format conversion and CD ripping.
For something that looks prettier and has really good “visualizations”, comprehensive plug-in support, also supports video formats, comprehensive library features and can access “GraceNotes” for automatic id3 tagging, you could try WinAmp.
Both programs are available free. There is also a paid version of WinAmp that has a couple of enhanced features over the free version, but the free version is still very capable.
Not really. The beta version is the officially recommended version for Windows 7, Vista and OS X 10.6 and is the default version on Linux. In fact, most of the regulars on this forum recommend the 1.3 version for all computers (unless there is an overriding reason why 1.2.x needs to be used).
“Alpha testing” is more “on the edge”, though not difficult once you are reasonably familiar with the beta version. I generally have both the beta version (for doing audio editing) and a recent alpha version (for testing) installed at the same time - there’s a couple of precautions that need to be taken to keep the two separate, but it’s quite easy to do. When you feel that you are reasonably familiar with the beta version you may want to try this yourself.
There are several other ways that people can help - see here: http://audacityteam.org/community/
We are always happy to see new people helping out on this forum - as you get to know how to use Audacity you will probably find that there are some forum questions that you are able to answer. Please feel free to do so. If you give a “wrong” answer, there is likely to be a more experienced user around to put you right. This is a great way to really get to know Audacity in depth.
And I would add iTunes as player to consider (available free for both PC and MAC).
I know a lot of folk regard this as “bloat-ware” but it does a good job as an Audio jukebox on my PCs (But I do also use iPods so iTunes synching is important to me). One other useful job that iTunes does for me is to enable me to easily print CD covers (artwork and tracklists) for the recordings that I burn to CD.
I think that any media player that doesn’t play flac or ogg vorbis out-of-the-box should be shot to death
I used iTunes (as well as Safari) when I first bought my macbookpro nearly 3 years ago… iTunes was a bit too much “overkill” then but it was still usable (and Safari was fast). Then a lot of upgrades came and with them a lot of new eye-catching features… It totally killed it’s usability (same for Safari). I long ago switched to VLC as my favourite audio player app on mac (beautifully simple and fast and supports a lot more formats out-of-the-box). I put Safari to the corner some time ago too in favour of the much simpler and faster chrome.
