Getting good sound input

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

Hi:

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).

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.

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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
[email protected]
http://auximini.cjb.net

Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day

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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.

Make sure your mixer settings are reasonable.

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.

The problem is almost certainly not the kernel drivers.

Britton Kerin