WHY DOESN"T THIS DAMN THING PLAY MY MUSIC ???? A few tips about PC's, noise and Music, by way of introduction for the complete newbie, and financially challenged aspiring PC musician: Part 1 Working backwards from your Pentium/Win95 speakers: Your speakers have little amps built into them. they hook up to the OUTPUT of your soundcard. You could connect them to a walkman instead. Same wire you use to hook a walkman or CD player to a stereo. (Get one or 2 of those wires- they will come in handy!) Earlier souncards had amps built into them, so you could use any old speaker. These turned out to be good for picking up taxicab radio. Guess why newer soundcard don't do this any more. Inside your sound card are a few sections: A DAC, (digital analog converter) which takes raw digital music data and turns it into sound. Sound data recorded OR created on your computer can be turned into analog (regular) sounds that you can hear on your speakers. This is nothing special; computer hobbyists were building these DAC things 15 years ago with parts from Radio Shack. Around 10 years ago, they started putting these into soundcards. The first soundcards, based on the ADLIB design did not have them. Unless your computer is 10 years old, it probably has a card that has a DAC on it. Bits in .wav files turn into noise /music! The reverse is possible too: you can stuff analog sound from a microphone line (mono) OR line-in (stereo) into your computer. Depending on your microphone or the stereo signal you are pumping in, you might have to either use a pre-amp OR turn the volume way way down. The sensitivity, or "gain" is about the same as cheap cassette recorder. There is NO standard for gain controls built into standard PC soundcards - just a volume control. There IS the ability for Windows 95's etc., ugly mixing facility to connect with your card: a virtual mixing board- with badly designed controls, that can be used to mix a few things at the same time: 1)a music CD playing. 2)a .wav sample OR .wav output drum box playing out the DAC. 3) and a midi file playing. 4) you, yelling some nonsense into a microphone. All at the same time, out to your speakers or tape deck. Some soundcard mfgs. include slightly better looking or even working versions of this software mixer, but the W95 one is always there: that little speaker sitting at the bottom right hand of your screen. (If you have it enabled) ONE thing per "channel". Lets deal with some of these: Next on the list of junk on your soundcard is an FM synth section. Early cards had 2 oscillators (beeepy things); modern cards have 4, and a whole bunch of filter functions, which can be used to fake up some instrument sounds. The only thing you can't make with these are convincing voices. Depending on your card, these either sound like a beeping xmas card, or a pretty good fake of a garage sale keyboard. Very early games used these for music, This was the ADLIB card standard. A modern $200+ soundcard can still fake an ADLIB card, but why bother. However, these beepy things can be used for another neat thing: MIDI! The MIDI standard evolved almost 30 years ago, and is something like a big piano roll for many instruments. A while ago, someone figured out that one extra chip on the sound card could take a collection of settings for the above FM synth section and use them as INSTRUMENTS according to the general midi scheme. Most cards also faked up the midi connector for standard midi signals that go in and out of keyboards and drum machines, so you can use the computer to trigger, and therefore SEQUENCE your midi drum machine. You can also have the piano roll (a midi file) roll through a player to trigger the soundcard "instruments" and play the song. Think of this as a music box on steroids. ONE problem... one computer might sound a whole lot different than another, depending on the setup, soundcard, and a whole lot of other stuff. Related thing: most soundcards have a JOYSTICK port on them. This is because the modern PC sound card first gained popularity as an accessory for computer games. The plug has 15 pins, only a few are used by the joystick, and that's why there is room for the MIDI connection via the expensive cable on this plug. Some music programs allow you to use the Joystick to wobble the settings on say, a drumbox program. IMPORTANT THING HERE: The cable that hooks to your sound card to do MIDI is NOT A STANDARD $6 midi cable. It has a different plug on one end, and hooks in where the joystick hooks in. It has a circuit built into it (thats why the big plug end is oversized) that electrically isolates your PC from your midi keyboard/drum machine/etc. This is a real good thing, unless you want to drive line voltage through the whole hookup and fry everything. It COULD happen! So they designed it expensively. Related note: Never, Never run a cable from your TV's earphone jack to ANYTHING, unless you want to risk a lesson about WHY the PC midi cable is designed expensively! Nuthin to do with MIDI, but the same SAFETY principle. The cable wholesales for US$20 (you figure out the retail price). With this cable, music students can use the garage-sale midi keyboard as a "note typewriter" to write their music with. The rest of us can try out various SOFTWARE SYNTHS, where the keyboard goes silent, and all the sound-making goes on inside the PC. This is handy for faking old 60's synth sounds, or on a fast PC, incredible sounding samples, way beyond the capability of the garage sale midi keyboard. Another way cool thing: There are more than a few piano tutor programs out there that will use this set-up to run you through the piano drills you skipped out of as a kid - minus the sadistic penguins (cf: The Blues Brothers, etc.) who kept whacking your fingers when you hit a wrong note! WHAT ELSE?... Earlier WIN 3.1 sound cards often had a CDROM controller built on board. This was because early CDROM readers did not hook up to a PC using the same cable and protocol as a pc hard drive. Even when most cdrom readers switched to ATAPI (like a hard drive), plenty of 486 pc's only had room for 2 hard drives, so extra ATAPI/IDE ports, or rarely SCSI (dont go there) ports got built onto sound cards. We don't use these now. ALSO: Almost all souncards have a special jack built onto them, on the card part INSIDE the computer, which acts as a dedicated stereo line-in for the audio signal that comes out of the back of your CDROM reader. ALL modern pc CDROM readers can be asked to play AUDIO cds. That is what the earphone jack in the front is for. There is a special jack in the back of the CDROM reader that connects with a special cable to the special jack mentioned above. This is like running a wire OUT of the earphone jack in the front of your CDROM reader to an extra LINE IN plug on the back plate of your soundcard. ONCE AGAIN: They put it there, so you dont have to use up your LINE-IN jack. If you can't hear your Beach Boys CD playing inside that ancient 386, maybe you should make sure that cable is in place. Try headphones in the jack in front. Then look for the little wire off the back of the CDROM, inside your PC, going to the soundcard. Not the colored power wire, and not the flat ribbon cable. Once more: do not confuse this signal with a digital audio signal. It is just as analog as the signal you send into the line-in or microphone jack. Digital Audio jacks: Lots of modern PC CDROM readers have some form of odd DIGITAL AUDIO out jacks. SOME high-end sound cards have digital audio jacks on them. Whether these 2 jacks have anything to do with each other is a real good question. Standards are still busy shaking themselves out. 98% of the music and sound software out there is quite happy to ignore this issue. If you MUST deal with this, search www.deja.com on the subject. Playing an audio CD puts virtually no strain on your computer. A 15 year old 286 can be hooked up with a CDROM reader and play music CDs; even from the DOS command line. In case you haven't clued in yet, an 8x CDROM reader reads DATA at speeds up to 8x faster than an audio cd plays. Or at least claims to... You cannot command the CDROM reader to vary the speed of AUDIO playback, commercial programs can fake this though.. If your CDROM is 4 speed or better, it probably can do DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) or "ripping". If it can do ripping, you can find many programs that do this in DOS and WINDOWS. A ripper fools windows (or DOS) into thinking the music data is a file, and then converts it into a .WAV file on the fly. This is pretty easy, as a .wav file (at CD quality) can be almost identical to the data on a music CD. (How smart of them to keep it that way) There are other sound file formats, but these can be converted. (MAC folks use something else, but mac folks think that tossing $$$ around saves them from having to learn difficult stuff like this, and/or what the other mouse button is for.) For most of us, the DATA "ripped" off an audio CD is close enough to perfect. Because the little extra stuff that DATA cds use to guard against errors is left out to gain more time for the music, there might be some subtle differences. Big Deal. There are some ripping programs that read the same song OVER & OVER & OVER until they can statistically figure out what is an EXACT copy of your audio CD, down to the last bit, which might well be a scratch on the CD anyways. These take longer, but some audio experts love them. A lot of GREAT free rippers run in DOS. There is a version of the win95 CD driver file built into Windows that will show music tracks as data tracks, and copy them right off the audio CD onto your hard drive in ripped form. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with ALL w95 setups, so it is one of those TRY-AT-YOUR-OWN-RISK things. A www.deja.com search will turn it up. Just remember that the way digital audio gets pulled off an audio CD is completely different than the way sound is PLAYED off an audio CD. Digital audio goes down the BIG FLAT RIBBON CABLE, just like program data! One more midi-related thing about some soundcards, used with Pentium class computers: Depending on the age, cost and REAL manufacturer's chip-set (the big names contract out, you can buy a "second" that is identical to a $200 card for $35... this takes news-group/ www.deja.com research) of your card. With these, you can also load digital sound samples into sound "BANKS" that are triggered by the midi sequencer instead of the beepy FM synth sounds. These take some work, and a more powerful machine (or an odd, expensive early soundcard) to get up and running, but they sound better. Hardware, hardware, hardware. . . Your soundcard plugs into your PC. It used to be that all soundcards- heck ALL computer cards whatsoever- were ISA (a standard kind of card format) Modern soundcards plug into PCI slots, which can move more data MUCHO faster. A no name PCI soundcard closes out at $20. If you bought your computer in the last 2 years, it probably has a PCI soundcard, although -bad news- someone might have built the card's guts right onto your PC motherboard. (oh well, you can still run a better card as a replacement or second card). A bargain bin 16bit ISA card closes out at $10. On a low-end pentium, a PCI cheapo card will easily play a few CD-quality samples at once, where the closeout ISA card will have to be set down to FM quality to handle the same samples without breaking up. Maybe even set down to MONO as well. Now, In a perfect world, we'd all have free P300 pc's, with the best soundcards, but I seem to always be running into people who just dont have the bucks for this, and still want to try out a little PC-sound stuff on the 2nd or 3rd hand clunker that someone gave them. My Humble opinion: If it can run W95, has a CD and a soundcard- Well. . Hot damn! another DRUM MACHINE! I found one of these (486, 16M, ISA soundcard) in tha garbage 3 weeks ago. Runs the original Rubber Duck without breaking a sweat. The V1 of seq303 at the same time. Stick a mono monitor on it, and off to a gig it goes! Now there is no way that I can put anything but an ISA soundcard in this thing (which is what was in it), or in the 486 that another one of my perpetually broke (like me) friends drags over for me to set up for them. I just keep thinking: Free drum machine! TIP: www.windrivers.com for hunting down the drivers you need to set the %^$%$ thing up. Cheap VS expensive soundcards: What is cheap today was expensive 1 or 2 years ago, and was unavailable 4 years ago. Plenty of folks will swear (and swear at you) that ONLY the ULTRA-MEGA-FOOBAR card is worth dealing with and everything else is SHIT! My humble advice: Learn on the cheap card or the card you have, then buy the ULTRA-etc., in a few months when you know enough to use it. Guess what? You can probably run BOTH cards in your PC: Very handy for DJ mixing programs- most of which have settings for multiple soundcards. As for the Soundcard snob? Six months from now, that little clown will be yelling all over the net: "SHIT!, You bought THAT piece of crap!!! EVERYONE knows that the GIGA-FELBUS-WUKWUK is THE CARD to have! Your ULTRA-MEGA-FOOBAR card is a piece of shit!. . ." and so on. Mommy & daddy are gonna buy him a girlfriend one day too! Paying $200 for a soundcard will not get you 10x better sound from your no-name PCI audio card. 5% improvememt MAX! Bottom line: The cheap no name card is fine for all of us beginners, unless we want to pay for bragging rights. However: When you are ready for a BETTER soundcard, time to spend some time on the newsgroups (start at www.deja.com) to see if you can find an OEM (white box, minimum support) version of this week's $200 card at a more reasonable price. Exception to the rule: You have a used, low-end pentium, with the world's worst ISA card, and a free PCI slot. See the next section on software: If Microsoft's DIRECT X can't connect with it, If you can't get W95 to load up its driver correctly, and you can't even get ONE CD quality .wav file to play without breaking up. . . Get something PCI in there FAST! Give the card to someone with a 386 running Win3.1- they can run WINDRUM (look for it) with it. TO RECAP: Soundcard = DAC + lines in & out (including CD audio line in) + beeping FM thingies + midi setup + port for joystick and expensive PC midi cable + compatibility with W95's mixer application. PCI slot soundcards are FASTER than ISA slot soundcards (older) A 10x more expensive soundcard will not give you 10x better performance. NEXT SECTION: Software Intro! (c) 2k King Beat Rythm Box Collective.