Can't record to any SB card under XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter RWhite
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RWhite

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Well this is embarrassing, usually I can figure out almost any Windoze issue, but this one has me stumped. I'm hoping it's something stupid I overlooked, and someone out there will read this and know it.

OK here's the background. I do all of my "serious" recording in my basement studio. But I keep my general-purpose PC upstairs and I also use this for doing things like transferring albums to CDR. Until recently I had no problems at all. My setup in this "second studio" is a small mixer (Behringer 802, no snickers please) which has it's Tape Out connectors fed into the sound cards Line In. The mixer's Control Room Out feeds a small amp and speakers. The mixer's line ins include: a stereo receiver (which has turntable/cassette/VCR/CD fed into it); a return from the sound cards line out; and a feed from the computers ATI All-In-Wonder card (basically a cable TV tuner). This setup has worked fine, so long as you keep the Line-In level Muted under the "Playback" volume control (otherwise you have a feedback loop with the sound card).

I did mucho recording with this gear under Windows 98. I recently went through a rather hellish Windows XP update (posted here in another thread) but now have the XP system humming along fine. At the same time I updated to XP I switched from a SB Live card to a SB Audigy card. I have used the Audigy for playing games and playing back .WAV files with no problems. So two nights ago I attempt some recording for the first time since the upgrade, just recording some stuff off the radio. When I set up Sound Forge I see that there is no input being shown. Now I have not changed any hardware connections; my mixer confirms that it is seeing the source signal, but the computer sees nothing.

In the course of troubleshooting I have tried the following:

* Tried the dippy Sound Recorder program built into XP, which likewise sees no signal coming in.

* Bypassed the mixer and fed the signal directly into the card. The signal comes back into the mixer from the line out, which tells me the signal IS getting into the card and is being passed back through to the line-out.

* Verified in both Control Panel / Audio and Sound Forge itself that the SB Audigy is selected as the preferred device for both recording and playback.

* Tried every possible fader combination under the system volume control. When Line-In is selected as the recording input, Sound Forge shows some background noise (about –69db) coming in, with any other source setting it shows nothing.

* Tried rolling back to the original driver, but that is a Big Sorry (actually I have yet to see any example anywhere of this new XP feature actually working)

I finally concluded that my Audigy card must be defective, and kick myself for buying an OEM card (since neither the retailer or Creative are going to do dick for me about replacing it). So I give up and re-install my old SB Live card.

Of course the same damn thing happens. Like with the Audigy, it plays sounds fine, but the system sees NO sound coming in through the Line-In. Unlike the Audigy, the SB Live does not “pass through” any Line-In sound through to the Line-out.

The only wild card I can see in this deal is that I have an ATI All-In-Wonder video card, which has the ability to record video and audio. A conflict between this card and the sound card is a definite possibility, but there is nothing I have found in the Windows system to indicate that such a conflict is happening. And of course this same hardware combination worked fine under Windows 98.

At this point I am considering sacrificing a goat and spreading it’s entrails around the PC to drive out evil spirits. Does anyone out there have any other ideas? I have to believe it is software related. I am continuing to look through Creative's site, have not found anything yet, will check ATI’s site next.
 
Does the ATI have audio inputs? That may be the problem. Do you have another video card you could try to see if that fixes it? Does your MOBO have a built in sound card? If so you may have to disable it in the bios.

Those are the only other things I can think of right now.
 
hmmm....

I am using sblive to record in xp all the time. I haven't even bothered to get creatives drivers since Xp's are working so well.

This may be a dumb question, but have you tried checking your cables out on another device?

Perhaps a different PCI slot?


You've pretty much done everything else I can think of except a reinstall of XP, but that is a pretty radical step. You definately wanna make sure you've tried EVERYTHING before you go there.
 
Answer to Tex & Sonny:

The ATI All-In-Wonder has a coax cable input, which brings in a cable TV video & audio signal, plus S-Video, RCA video, & RCA audio inputs. It also has S-Video, Composite video, and audio outputs. It is my leading suspect at this point, but like I said I can't find anything in Windows itself that reports a conflict.

The cables are the same ones I have been using, but on the theory that "anything is possible" I swapped the cables out too, with no change. As I mentioned, with the Audigy card the audio signal is going into the card and then being passed through to the line out, but no software will recognize that the signal is actually there.

Hmmm that goat idea is starting to look good.
 
RWhite -

Did you install XP disabling ACPI? My understanding is that if you don't install in standard PC mode, everything will get assigned to a single IRQ. Could that be causing a conflict?

Just a guess, I haven't taken the XP plunge yet.
 
dachay2tnr said:
RWhite -

Did you install XP disabling ACPI? My understanding is that if you don't install in standard PC mode, everything will get assigned to a single IRQ. Could that be causing a conflict?

Just a guess, I haven't taken the XP plunge yet.


Thats not entirely true. I follwed instructions posted here and elsewhere to disable ACPI, and devices are still sharing IRQ's on my system. :(
 
Well my sound card is working now, although I'm not exactly sure WHY. The solution was about as stupid as I could have predicted.

Before I get into it, dach no I did not do anything special during the XP install. My devices are all pretty well seperated, just my network card and the VIA chipset sharing IRQ5. Other than that everything looks about what it looked like in Win98 as far as resource allocation goes.

I found a fairly obscure reference buried in a Creative bulitin about issues with Video capture cards, which increased my suspicion about my ATI All-In-Wonder. I started off by downloading 4 new drivers from ATI for Video, Video capture, Multimedia Center, and DVD playback. Despite my telling it not to, the ATI Multimedia center install re-did all my file associations. Unfortunately the recording problem remained. So I reset my files associations and turned my attention back to the audio card. I deleted all sound device drivers and switched back from the SB Live card to the Audigy. As before XP detected the card and loaded it's built-in drivers. This time however I proceeded to install the whole kettle of software from the included Audigy CD. I had tried this once before a few weeks ago when trying to set up an Athlon system, and had seen enough of the software to decide I really didn't want this shit on my computer. More importantly, this install brings up a half-dozen XP warnings that say it is installing things that will screw up your USB settings and leave you system unstable. However I reasoned that if the ATI card was somehow taking exclusive control of audio recording, a good bet would be to install the full Audigy suite AFTER updateing the ATI software. Besides, it aint working now anyways, so what the hell....

Of course the Creative software once again re-did all my file associations, EVEN AFTER I TOLD IT NOT TO. WHEN WILL THESE GODDAM SOFTWARE COMPANIES GET A CLUE THAT SOME PEOPLE INSTALL OTHER PROGRAMS BESIDES THEIRS!!!!!! Jeez what a pain.... initially it seemed a failure, I immediately tried a test record and had the same problem - no incoming signal detected. But then I went into the newly appeared Control Panel / Audio HQ / Mixer, which on the surface appears to just be a front end for the system volumne control. But when I made a few adjustments in this little guy, suddenly my Audigy cards springs to life. I've got signal! YEEE HAAAAAA!!!

Since its 2:30am, I'm going to leave further experimenting until tomorrow. I'm half-expecting that my ATI card has now lost the ability to record audio and/or video. If so, I'll just have to live with it. I think I may also look to download some XP driver updates from Creative. I have heard on this board to stay away from the new SBLive XP drivers, does this hold true about the Audigy as well? I'm still a bit nervous about all those warnings I got installing from the Audigy driver CD, which was obviously a pre-XP driver disk. I have to believe that real XP drivers would be a good thing.... but then again, who knows?
 
I haven't bothered with the creative updated drivers for my sblive mainly since It works perfectly without them AND I have no need to utilize soundfonts right now, since I need a new midi controller keyboard. I will probably go ahead and use them once I get my new keyboard and new sound card for 24/96 recording. Until then I've decided to let well-enough alone.
 
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