Time to throw away a perfectly good soundcard (no drivers for win 7)

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davethewave

Member
I've Been recording on a old pc with Audacity,windows XP,E MU 1212 soundcard with good
results.But at 16 bit.I tried Reaper at 24 bit but got alot of noise (pops and clicks).
I have A new hard drive with windows 7 on hold because I'm not sure what my next purchase
should be.RME soundcard? Will this 16 year old 2 core 2.93 GHZ PC with 2GB ram make good
recording at 24bit?
Is slapping in a good soundcard all that's involved here? I'm only recording live broad
casts on the internet.

thanks
 
I would put at least 4 GB of RAM in that computer. If you are installing 64-bit Win7, then I'd go to 8GB if the chipset supports it. My 2010 MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo is spec'd to support 8GB (I upgraded from 4), though many folks have installed 16GB successfully. (I worry about thermals in notebooks, so didn't push it.)

Honestly, 16 years old is asking a lot. Might be time to look at an upgrade.
 
Hi there,

davethewave said:
I tried Reaper at 24 bit but got a lot of noise (pops and clicks).
Click to expand...

The first thing to do is find out why.
Is this under heavy workload or just with one or two tracks?
Lots of plugins and virtual instruments on the go or a relatively plain session?

What is your buffer/latency set to? The smaller that is the less latency there is, but the greater the load on the computer will be.
It was very common with older machines to have to juggle this setting for recording/mixing, and freeze tracks/disable plugins to facilitate low-latency recording.
It's not really that much of a concern with more powerful modern computers.

If you determine that these things aren't the problem, then look towards monitoring hardware activity.
You're either running out of ram, pushing the cpu to max, or your HDDs can't move audio around quickly enough : Or some combination.
It may be that the machine needs an upgrade in one of these areas.

N.B. if cpu is sitting at 100% then more ram won't help.

The first commercial dual cores were 05/06 so I guess your machine isn't quite 16? Maybe it's a Core2Duo E7500?
Drop us some detailed specs, if you can. :) Motherboard model number would be great. (try CPU-Z).
 
Last edited:
Thanks to all that responded.After reading your thoughts maybe i'd be better off
leaving it the way it is.Cause what it sounds like to me is alot money with
the possibility of slight improvement if any.
With Reaper I did record some single tracks that sound good but recording a 4
hour show and going back and cutting out the commercials was a PIA.
 
speaking of throwing away stuff, somewhere I have a Digi001 breakout box, and PCI card. IIRC it ran Pro Tools LE 6.0. It used to run in my G5 dual processor tower until the PS died. At the time, a PS was stupid money because the demand was high. Apparently this model had a known issue and I missed the class action suit by 2 months (of course). After that the only Mac I could afford were Minis so no more PCI card.

Not that I really want to go back to Pro Tools, it had a stupid steep learning curve but I do know much more about direct recording than I did back then. I wonder what I could be doing with PT if I had stuck with it. But anyway, I hate to throw away functioning electronics but what is anybody ever going to do with this thing?
 
How about a recorder?

davethewave said:
I'm only recording live broad
casts on the internet.

thanks
Click to expand...

Have you thought about getting a small digital recorder with LINE-IN? I needed to get five minutes of audio from a 2+ hour YouTube video. I have software to DL the whole thing and then "open audio from video" in Adobe Audition. Instead, I set my small Sony recorder for LINE-IN, plugged in a decent patch cord to the headphone jack and jumped to where the five minutes was located on the Youtube video. The recorder saves a quality MP3 to an SD card. That was popped into my laptop, opened in Audtion, edited, and saved as a WAV file.
 
radi0j0hn said:
Have you thought about getting a small digital recorder with LINE-IN? I needed to get five minutes of audio from a 2+ hour YouTube video. I have software to DL the whole thing and then "open audio from video" in Adobe Audition. Instead, I set my small Sony recorder for LINE-IN, plugged in a decent patch cord to the headphone jack and jumped to where the five minutes was located on the Youtube video. The recorder saves a quality MP3 to an SD card. That was popped into my laptop, opened in Audtion, edited, and saved as a WAV file.
Click to expand...

I just set my OEM sound card input to "what you hear" or "stereo mix" or whatever the equivalent is and capture it directly to my DAW.
 
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