The good news is that old hardware works great. The bad news is that new hardware might not. As long as hardware makers are under the Microsoft yoke, they will continue to keep specs to themselves and their binary Microsoft drivers, lest Microsoft break their drivers and ruin their already battered reputations. Hardware makers who don't care about their reputations will continue to sell different hardware as the same model. When free software works, it works well but you have to do some homework to make sure a sound card will work.

OK, I admit that I suck. While I've made several sound cards play, I have been unable to make anything but ancient 16bit Creative Sound Blasters record. This gives a maximum sample rate of 48,000 16 bit stereo samples per second. CDs use the same at 44,100 samples per second. Don't ask me about midi, wave tables and all that. I've spent many days here and there trying out PCI cards and embedded sound cards on motherboards. Other people can do better. Did I say something about doing your homework?

I had several Sound Blasters and they worked, so I use them. Just add the card and the lines "sb" and "sound" to your /etc/modules file to make your sound blaster work. See here for details. One of my cards came with a SCSI controller on it, so my music box has a few SCSI devices too.

"Music box?" you ask. The computer I've done most of my recording with is a discarded Gateway "family PC". It came with a 133MHz Pentium, a couple of hard disks, a broken installation of Windows 98, a huge case and a cute little cartoon family drawing on the outside. I replaced the 150 Watt power supply with a 250 Watt model, added an extra fan, the sound card, 64 MB RAM, two SCSI disks a SCSI CDROM, three IDE disks a network card and a reasonable operating system. I might buy another SCSI drive off ebay one day. The huge box has room for more hardware. The software is as good as any, and the box requires no keyboard mouse or monitor for me to have GUI access to recording and playing.

I have done some recording and almost all my compression work on other computers. I'm not a masochist. Any old idle computer will do for ripping, but the bigger the better.

Next Making it Work.