home music recording + static

[corticalhomunculus]

I've started trying my hand at some home-recording using audacity, which works quite well except every track picks up a lot of static. In fact just monitoring the mike input i can see the red bar vibrating without even making any input.

heres what i have:

mandrake 10.1

mixer: kmix

recorder: audacity (whatever version came with mdrk 10.1 community)

amd athlon 950, 256 sdram, via chipset AND onboard sound (supported by ALSA)

 

I'm dual booting with win2k for the few things mandrake can't do for me (like reliably play a lot of games) and under windows the recording doesn't have the same staticy problem, so i have to assume it's something along the software translation line that it's occuring

any ideas?

[devries]

Do you get static when the mic isn't plugged in? Then look at how the soundcard is connected, interference etc.

 

If not lower the mics input volume (the slidebar in audacity)

[corticalhomunculus]

wasn't getting static when not recording, but i fixed the problem...or rather circumvented it.

I disabled ALSA on boot and am now static free, but now I'm missing out on all the cool little ALSA sliders. VIA audio has always been a headache for me, time to start shopping for a decent pci audio card methinks. Ah well, art comes first. It will all be worth it once I get that record contract

[adamw]

I've been doing shopping myself, here's some pointers to save you time: Audigy cards work but are expensive for fairly ordinary sound quality. For very nice sound quality, get an M-Audio Revolution 5.1 (7.1 in a pinch) or Audiophile 2496 (the 192 doesn't work yet). For really, really nice sound quality at more expense, track down an RME DIGI 96/8 PAD (try eBay, for reasonable prices, or else you're looking at $300-$400). Hope that helped :)

[corticalhomunculus]

I heard good things about the audiophile, by "doesn't work" do you mean it's not supported by ALSA yet? Audigy looks really fancy, but yeah, so does it's pricetag. I need to upgrade my six dollar mic too, any recommendations? any bass levels going through that thing sound like a sloth choking on an apple.

[adamw]

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean by 'doesn't work'. But I just remembered another gotcha - scratch the Revolution 5.1 from the list, only the non-free version of OSS supports that. The Revo 7.1 is almost as good. Audigy 2 sound quality is around the same as the Audiophile or Revolution; it's a better card than those two for Windows gamers (as it does hardware-accelerated 3D effects in Windows), but not for anyone else.

 

As for a mic, sorry, not my area I'm afraid! I have a translucent blue mic that cost $2 from the Chinese New Year market. :)

 

P.S. - anyone who knows about this area may wonder why I haven't mentioned the Chaintech AV-710. It's a very popular card with budget-minded users, as it can give you stereo quality equal to the Audiophile or Revolution cards much cheaper. Unfortunately, doing this requires a bit of driver jiggery-pokery which is trivial under Windows and used to work under Linux but has been broken for the last three ALSA revisions, so I don't recommend it to Linux users any more. ALSA seem supremely uninterested in fixing the problem, quelle surprise. My poor, unloved bug report is here: https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=986

Edited April 7, 2005 by adamw