USB connection has problems

[dkr]

Hello
I have an ION URecord box which I use to attach my computer (via USB) to my
old Thorens TD 160C turntable. This works fine on XP. On my preferred machine
a Linux (8.04 hardy - linux2.6.24-24 ) things are not so swell.

Upon pressing the record button it is apparent that sound is getting through but
this system is stuttering or perhaps sputtering and the music is just barely
recognizable as flute music. Completely useless for recording.

I hope that someone out there knows what is wrong and can explain it to me.

Thank you for your time.

dkr

[dkr]

oops I forgot to mention - Audacity 1.3.5-beta Sorry!

[steve]

Make sure that you are using the ALSA drivers and not the old OSS drivers. If that does not fix it then unless you fancy doing some fairly major manual updating to quite a lot of bits of your system it may be best to stick with XP until you upgrade to Jaunty (or later).
One of the really good points in XP is that it handles audio pretty well. The standard install of Linux is usually rather less efficient with audio, though this is improving.

[dkr]

Thank you for the reply.

I have a dual boot system Hardy & Jaunty (64).
I tried audacity on Jaunty & it appears to work. I say appears because I
have not made sound work at all in that system. Clearly my next problem
on the road to 64 bit!
Thanks again.
dkr

[steve]

Jaunty uses Pulse Audio by default. It can be quite difficult to get your head round how it works / how to get it working, but once you figure it out it works pretty well. It seems that quite a few people give up on it, but it's worth persevering with. The problem is essentially due to the fact that it can look quite different from one computer to another due to hardware differences, so there's not much help that anyone can give you (one of those things that you have to figure out for yourself). The other problem is that like the sound system on Vista, the people at Ubuntu have not really set it up for recording. For using Pulse Audio for recording you really need to install the Pulse Audio Volume control - for some strange reason this does not appear to be installed by default. The next thing to figure out is what all of your devices are called. Once you've done that, you can use the Pulse Audio Volume Control to route audio signals from your audio applications to use any available audio device drivers.

Another alternative for Audacity 1.3.7 on Jaunty is to use "Jackd" (Jack Audio sound system). I've had difficulty getting many versions of Audacity to work with Jackd, but the default 1.3.7 version worked great with it.

I think that the Linux developers have still some way to go with the sound system, which is such a shame because it is capable of working brilliantly. At least progress can be seen.