no stereo recording

[Graham Cousins]

I have recently bought a CD burner to produce CD's of various projects, my band, my demo's, my midi compositions etc. Everything is ok until I try to record stereo midi from my SW60xg into my soundblaster soundcard. I can hear it playing in stereo coming from the speaker output of the Soundblaster but when I check the recording it has effectively recorded a mono signal on one channel and a muffled version on the other. I have now tried the same excercise with a stereo cassette player, and a stereo mini disk player and the same occurs. I have also tried different stereo leads, and I've tried the same with my son's Soundblaster Platinum all with the same result. I'm wondering if stereo recording is a possibility or not.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Hmm...you confused me.

Are you saying that you recorded your SW60xg with your computer, tape player, and minidisc....or are you saying that you tried to record the SW60xg, the tape player, and the minidisc with the COMPUTER?

I'm assuming it's the latter. I would at first guess that it's a software problem. What software are you using to record? Are you aware that most software requires you to specifiy whether you will be recording in stereo or mono? And most recording software will allow you to monitor a mono signal in stereo (well, out of two speakers).

So, I'm guessing that your software is not setup properly. The "muted" audio coming out of one speaker is probably noise residue from the soundcard...how loud is it? You seem to have covered all the bases (if I'm understanding you correctly), and the odds of two soundcards being bad in the exact same way are minute.

Stereo recording is of course possible, as we all do it

WAIT...I had a thought: are you plugging into the microphone port on your soundcard? If so, that's the problem. The microphone port *appears* to be stereo, but it's actually mono as one channel is used to feed phantom power to cheap computer microphones. You'll need to use the line in port on the soundcard.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Graham Cousins]

Ah I think I see the problem. although I am selecting to record in Stereo in Cool Edit Pro, and although I am inputing a stereo signal using a stereo lead into the line in socket, the software mixer where I select which input to record from appears to be a mono only device ( it has only one recording level slider so thats why I draw that conclusion). Therefor my question is how to get hold of and install a stereo mixer for my soundwave 64 sound card.