soundcards, and the love thereof

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soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Chelly » Sat May 30, 2009 8:44 am

somehow last friday night, the lightning storm that knocked out my internet for 5 days (and provided me with 3 visits to ISP headquarters to say Hi), also took out my sound card - even though everything is behind 2 surge protectors/voltage regulator/battery.

so it's a week later and I finally went out and picked up a new sound card (I have a second computer that I use to try out different operating systems and software on so it acted as my sound system for the week). I bought a $15 Genius Sound Maker 5.1 value card. Wasn't expecting much obviously, just to be able to play some tunes, get back to chatting on Skype with clients etc.
It's now 6 hours of fucking around to try and get this thing to work.
I already know that sound cards are notorious for causing problems - I just did a google search for "sound card problem" and got 90 million hits to back up my point.
But I'm a fucking expert, right?
Tried latest drivers, oldest drivers, manufacturer's drivers and resellers drivers, latest chipset drivers, latest BIOS, disabled onboard audio - all the shit you would normally do. Usually the drivers would start installing and then just lock up. A couple of times I got drivers installed but then Windows (XP SP3) would stop loading on the reboot and I'd have to go back to previous known good configuration and start over every time. Figured I would start fresh tomorrow but would download a few more drivers from C-Media (the actual chip on the sound card as opposed to the box it came in). Just for shits and giggles I grabbed the latest Vista drivers for this card (note again, I am not using Vista). Well which one do you think worked flawlessly and is providing me with some background music to expunge my frustration right now? Fuck I hate Vista for that. Must be that latest XP Service Pack 3 update that allows that Vista driver to work when every single other one didn't.
Bleh, who cares right?
Fucking sound cards and lightning storms.

just thought this forum needed another post not related to this forum.
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Woodsman » Sat May 30, 2009 1:09 pm

My sound is also not working, but I do not think it's the card. I think it's the either the operating system recent update (in my case vista 64bit in which the most recent update was sp2 a few days ago) or possibly anti-virus software or other software running in the background. I will know more later, but am scanning my entire computer for bugs right now.

I'm just about ready to sell all computers and go back to the slide rule and paper. This is getting ridiculous.
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Chelly » Sat May 30, 2009 1:24 pm

when they've got Adobe creative suite 4 ready for Ubuntu, I'm there. I've already got it on a 3rd IDE drive that I just plug the power into for when I want to check it more - for now it's just a curiosity thing. But pretty much every piece of software I use except for those directly related to work (and I'm already an OpenOffice user for years), I can get a reasonable facsimile in Linux. I mean, how sold are we on our MP3 players or Videoplayers. VLC probably already has an Ubuntu version, Firefox, Openoffice, Thunderbird - except for the obvious games, and my aforementioned Adobe Creative Suite, what else is there? although there is quite possibly a few thousand drivers that aren't available yet either. But I have been pleasantly surprised at what little I have to do to get an Ubuntu OS set up and running.

by the way, good luck with the sound card thing. I suggest a notepad so you're not retracing your steps a few times and always moving forward toward a solution.
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby coldharvest » Sat May 30, 2009 1:35 pm

I know the law. And I have spent my entire life in its flagrant disregard.
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Kurt » Mon Jun 01, 2009 11:29 pm

Sometimes the obvious is the best help.

Did you delete your old soundcard software?

That likely is not it but I figured it cannot hurt to ask.

The next step I would take would be to go to windows update and see if there is a Windows approved driver for the card.

After that I would normally recommend installing Linux but to be honest Linux has been usurped by audio nerds and getting sound to work well in Linux is now a royal pain in the ass because of too many choices of drivers.
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Woodsman » Tue Jun 02, 2009 1:32 am

Chelly: I found my problem...check #4...that's what my issue was (like Kurt suggests above - it was obvious)!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948481
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Woodsman » Tue Jun 02, 2009 1:34 am

coldharvest wrote:Ridiculous?
No, this is ridiculous
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4JGn2XAH9g&feature=related


Good thing I'm observant or I wouldn't have seen that "hard gay" text come up before the movie played. LOL. No wonder you like pirates so much.
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby SRR » Tue Jun 02, 2009 5:35 am

Wait... people still buy sound cards? Isn't every motherboard made in the last five years already built-in with one?
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Re: soundcards, and the love thereof

Postby Chelly » Wed Jun 03, 2009 8:12 pm

yes, pretty much all motherboards come with onboard sound. but if it fails, or if you are into really high end audio and/or create or record music with the computer, you can spend a lot of money on sounds cards.
as far as mine went, again, I went through everything above, even the things mentioned by others that I hadn't mentioned myself (uninstall the old drivers, do a registry clean, then I got into the vortex of stalling during the driver installation or not being able to reboot into windows once installed. Then uninstall everything and start over again with a different driver. At no time was there a sound device displayed in any device profiles advanced menus.

When the end result is that a driver for different OS (the Vista one worked for an XP SP3 system) works, you know you're only going to get there through trial and error. When I tried the Vista one, it installed, asked for reboot, rebooted fine, and sound worked - just like it should have with any or all of the previous drivers...
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soundcards and the love thereof

Postby russlits » Sat Dec 01, 2018 11:02 am

What about TIntelRecord.ReadFromFile... how exactly does this work and what does it do? I didnt see a description for it in the help file, only the entry in the class.

Thanks for the example above. That explains most of the class really well.
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