[techtalk] More vinyl to digital

[Kathryn Hogg]

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for their suggestions about how to 
convert my little collection of vinyl LP's to a digital format.  I decided to
give it a whirl  by plugging a receiver into my sound card line in and seeing
what happens with software like gramophile or grecord.

The first thing I learned was about sharing the sound device.  I have esd 
running and gramophile didn't like that since it uses /dev/dsp directly.  But
the cool thing is that this clicked on a major light bulb about a problem 
I've been having with the real audio player blocking mouse clicks and such
while its playing.

The problem went away when I told the realplayer to use esd. I happen to have
my window manager configured to make annoying sounds on certain window 
events.  What was happening was that esd couldn't play the sounds while 
the realplayer had /dev/dsp open and this caused the window manager to block.

So back to recording, I hooked everything up set the mixer settings and 
everything appeared fine - the line in was being played back through the 
speaker and set up record to be line in.  It seems that what ever open call
on /dev/dsp for recording purposes is blocking or when done in O_NONBLOCK 
mode, it says device busy?  Yes, I killed esd before trying gramophile.

My system is one of these cheesy motherboards with everything under the sun
integrated with the SIS chipset including an esssolo1 sound chip.  Am I doing 
something wrong or would it appear to be a driver or hardware problem?

--
Kathryn Hogg