In non-audio related happenings, I'm still prepping for some major server overhauling at work; currently deciding which disk cloning software to use to get a 12GB non-RAID partition from a SCSI drive onto a new 74GB SCSI RAID 1 array.
In audio-related happenings, I recently slapped together a budget recording rig for my friend's PC (Windows XP on a Celeron D, Creative Sound Blaster Live! Drive I, CoolEdit Pro)... Well, all he really needed was a decent dynamic mic and an XLR-to-1/4" cable, but he doesn't know too much about that kind of stuff so I helped him out.
Back on the FireWire Solo front, I noticed that Pro Tools (M-Powered 7.4cs3) was knocking the interface's sample rate from 96kHz down to 44.1kHz and locking it there... Vista supports 24-bit/96kHz just fine, so this was perplexing... Turns out it's a documented issue. I was able to work around it by re-enabling my motherboard's integrated audio (some C-Media CMI97xx, using Windows XP drivers) and setting it as the default audio device before I load Pro Tools. Annoying, but not too bad.
All of this audio tweaking and research (coupled with a little bit of scandal) has me thinking about the state of sound processors in today's PC realm. Is resource-sharing onboard audio finally good enough? If PCI slots start disappearing en masse, will PCI Express take over, or is an external interface the way to go? If things go external and PCI disappears, will FireWire controllers adapt or is resource-sharing USB good enough? Perhaps digital outs and external receivers will become the norm? Then again, with all those multi-core CPUs becoming commonplace, maybe they'll just take over the grunt work and onboard audio will become nothing more than a pass-through...
No comments:
Post a Comment