After wrestling with alsa settings for far too long I now have a working recording appliance. It’s a Dell p3 1GHz with Dapper and an Audigy SB (rev 4) and a breakout box. I didn’t know what a breakout box was before today (for our purposes here it’s a box that fits in a drive bay and has I/O and volume/gain knobs). This particular breakout box has SPDIF, optical, MIDI, infrared, stuff I don’t remember, and ponies. You turn a knob and a shetland pops out.
Seriously though… this thing is CRAZY. I’ve seen sound cards at Intrex and such, but this thing goes to 11. Perhaps even more exciting, however, is the microphone we’ve got to match: an Audix OM 2. Not a studio condenser, but definitely leaps and bounds better than the $20 POS-brand desk mic I was using before.
Crimsun (the awesomest MOTU ev4r) pointed me to the Ubuntu Studio website, so now not only do I have the thing working, but I’m thinking of following all their interesting recommendations (eg. yanking GNOME in favor of something really lightweight like blackbox).
In non-audio news, my parents may actually let me build them a linux box AND buy another Mac. We’ll see.
Also, phone calls for MoveOn were supposed to start today, but I got sucked into this recording appliance.
Oof. Time for sleep.
{ 2 } Comments
I’ve had an audigy breakout box (there’s another name for it, but I can’t remember it right now) for several years now. I like having the firewire and headphones on the front of the computer where I can access it rather than having to dig under the desk at the back of the computer.
Yeah. It’s pretty handy, especially because I’d like to tuck the box neatly under my desk with two other PCs and a UPS. Fiddling around back would be a bit annoying to say the least.
I need to get some good headphones to use with this, something with cushioning.
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