It seems obvious...why doesn't it work? (or would it?)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hoot
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Hoot

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O.k. so I’m a newbie...but I’m trying to learn about sound, mixing and how sound cards work in general. I have a couple of what are pretty simple issues for you ‘sound techies’ out there. Aside from just trying to understand how a sound card works, in general (I have a Turtle Beach Montego, a Creative Sound Blaster Live Value!, and an ATI 9600 AIW multimedia card in 3 different computers), I would like to be able to record guitar tracks over piano tracks, etc., and to be able to save to disk streaming audio from sites like WebMD where a seminar might take place and I would like to record it for playback in my car while I’m stuck in traffic.

I’ve read through several other questions posted (and the answers given) and must say I was a bit lost when you started talking about Line in amplitude and Line out amplitude and ‘noise’, etc., etc.. Intuitively it seems to me that one ought to be able to connect a ‘line out’ (that would normally go to a speaker) to the ‘line in’ of a given sound card...and the sound would be captured and by some means be stored to disk? Again, my ignorance of the physics of sound cards is probably glaring about now and someone has to be rolling his eyes, but “Why wouldn’t this work?!” (Or would it?). What adjustments would have to be made to make it work, if any.

Thanks to anybody who can explain this to me!

Hoot
 
You're close- but a "line out" **doesn't** normally go to a speaker. It goes to a power amplifier which then increases the power of the signal to drive a speaker array. Some speakers, called "powered" or "active" have their own built in power amplifiers. This includes most computer or multimedia speakers, and many, but not all, studio reference monitors.-Richie
 
The thing you seem to be missing is a software package. The sound card doesnt automatically save everything coming into onto your hard drive (your drive would fill up very fast). You need a recording software to capture the audio coming into the line in of your soundcard. There are free s/w packages out there, ussually with limited ability comparied to the expensive ones. I beleive Krystal and Audacity are both open source free s/w. There is also pro-tools free if you happen to be using Win98 still.
 
you could even run a line out to a line in on the same soundcard if that floats your boat, i do that sometimes.
 
Line Out - Line In

Hi Dar:

Thanks for the reply to my question about sound cards. One member said I need special s/w to manage the HD storage of sound data coming to Line In, and you indicated that one could even run a line from Line Out to Line In on the same sound card. That seemed reasonable to me, but just seemed to obvious or easy...I felt there had to be a 'catch'? Are you saying that if I did this, it would be saved to disk? Do I need some kind of 'burning' or 'capture' s/w/?

Thanks,

Hoot
 
You'll need something like this to record...
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
(this ones free- there are better solutions if you want to pay for them)

You can use whatever cd-burning software you have to burn an Audio CD.

My advise- download that software- start playing around with it.
Good luck
 
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