Audiovation and CoolEdit v1.53
The purpose of this page,
is to show how you can use your Audiovation soundcard for MCA to do som actual
work.
In order to manipulate soundfiles, you will need a soundeditor, just like you
would need a wordprocessor to manipulate text. My choice for doing soundediting
is Cool Edit version 1.53 from Syntrillium. I tried a newer 32 bit version some
time ago, but it was mute. Before I go into further depts with this, a bit
about my hardware set up, so you can compare, if you get funny performance:
IBM9577i *Lacuna* with IBM 9525 monitor doing
800x600x65K
The latest bios upgrade installed
CPU AMD 5x86 aka Kingston Turbochip 133
L2 Cache 256KB
RAM 64MB ECC
SCSI-2 FW aka Corvette
SCSI harddrive Viking II 4G7
SCSI CD-RW Philips CDD3600 with 1MB cache off a FD-600
Audiovation Soundcard
Multimedia panel 41G3929 (Amplifier, speaker, volumecontrol, 6.3mm phone and
micjacks)
Since sound files in the
*.WAV format, 44KHz sampling frequency, 16 bit stereo (CD quality) consumes
approximately 173KB/second, 2GB drivespace is a minimum, if you want to hold
the equivalent of 74 minutes of CD music on top of everything else. The Philips
CDD3600 writes at x2 quite reliably, courtesy to the large cache, minimizing
risk of buffer underrun. It reads at x6, but the reading is rather sluggish,
compared to any off the shelf CD-Rom. And it reads really bad when the system
has been running for an hour, and things get hot.
Now
we have been through the hardware motions, a bit about the operating system:
Windows 95B OSR2 (Danish). The sluggish reading by the Philips CDD3600 is
somewhat improved, by editing c:\windows\system.ini so it has the lines:
[vcache]
MinCacheFile=8192
MaxCacheFile=8192
The
numbers prevents win95 from eating all of your RAM, and should not exceed 25
percent of your ditto.
If you intend to do editing of soundfiles extracted from CD-Audio, which is
common CD music converted to a format a computer can handle, without any analog
intermediate, you can technically use CoolEdit for the extraction proces. I
will recommend you use some other software for the extraction proces. CoolEdit
is limited to SCSI, and is very inflexible when it comes to finetunings,
getting stable strippings.
A separate page about extraction of CD-Audio, the Adaptec ASPI saga etc.:
CoolEdit can handle mp3
music, but again, rather poorly. More below.
Now let's take a look at
the CoolEdit stuff. CoolEdit v1.53 was designed for Windows 3.x, but works
nicely under Windows 95. I don't know whether Syntrillium still market this
product, but as of 25th aug 2000 there was nothing om their Internet site,
except for the patch. (Yes - they goofed first time around too). They do
however explain the difference between v1.53 and newer pure 32bit versions. A
download can be made from:
http://filedudes.infolink.com.br/win3xx/audioap/cooledit.html
If the above link lames,
mail me.
Don't forget to get the
patch from: (Patch repairs something that went wrong in the first try)
http://www.syntrillium.com/download/getfile.html?017 248KB
It is shareware, and you
are supposed to pay a fee (US$50 as of march 1999) to Syntrillium and register.
If you don't, you can use it anyway. If you have not registered, you have to
choose between features every time you launch the program:
When you launch a registered
version, the above is skipped, and you go straight into something like:
The above image tells
several things. All the greenish stuff reveals the waveform of a song popular
with the president of a certain union. (Not the one I live in, it has no
president - only commissars). Lets say, your aim is to take a soundbite out of
the chorus where they go *don't stop thinking about tomorrow* You simply
leftclick on the *Play* button and watch the vertical ruler follow the music
flowing through your Audiovation into your hifi:
When you visually have a
feeling of where the bite part begins and ends, stop the playing, and mark the
section as you would mark parts of text with a wordprocessor.
Hit the *Zoom In* button,
to make the selected part fill out the screen
Do further refinements, and
save your work. There is a lot of refinements you can do, fade in, fade out,
raise the overall level and who knows what. If you want to make a nonstop party
CD, you can use CoolEdit to cut all the leading and traling silence of each
track. In basic it works like any other cut and paste job, and only imagination
-etc. Click on the image above and listen. The eight seconds are converted from
CD quality WAV to RealAudio, since I am a nice person, who would rather load
you with 21KB than 1.4MB. Talking about RealAudio: I think I once lied to Louis
Ohland, by telling him that 32bit players will not work with Audiovation. This
was not true. The 32 bit Real Player version 5.0 from 1997, and the later G2,
works ok with Exploder 5.01DK. Haven't tried the latest version 8.
One thing though. In the
*Options* -> *Settings* you should reduce the default number of *Undo* from
5 to 1, or even zero. The undo facility eats resources, and if you don't have
them, CoolEdit might get stuck, and you have to do a ctrl-alt-delete. Same
place you might change the default workplace to suit your particular
configuration. (Place *Temp* and *Undo* at disk with largest empty space).
Thats
allmost all about it. I mentioned mp3 earlier. This is an area I haven't worked
too much, since my PS/2 don't have the muscle to play mp3 in stereo. Mono ok,
but not stereo. CoolEdit v1.53 can handle MP1-3 with the addition of some
patches. It do spent some time converting between mp3 and wav, and I'm not
shure whether the *.mp3 file extension works. You are on your own, after you
have downloaded the additional patches here
mp1 and mp2 100KB
mp3 135KB