Hello fellow Slackers,
I know it's been a while but heres what I've been up to lately. I'm trying to do some digital recording with my bass guitar and my computer. I've spent most of the weekend setting up audio software on my pc. So heres what I'm using...

I have a Dell Dimension 4300 which has a P4 running at 2ghz with an 80gb HDD and 1gb of DDR 333 RAM. For sound I'm using SB Audigy2 Platinum LS with the onboard breakout box. I'm Slackware 12 and my HDD is partitioned as such:As for audio software, this is what I have installed thus far:
Ardour
Jack
Alsa
Hydrogen
Freewheeling
...as well as all assorted libraries and dependencies....

My problem is that when I plug my bass in I don't get any signal on screen nor through my speakers. However, I have no problem hearing the drum track from Hydrogen so I'm guessing that it may be a hardware issue. Does anybody know if the breakout box for this particular soundcard is supported? I've checked the Alsa site and Google but no luck. I've tried finding a decent How-To but no luck either. I know that there are several Multi-media distro's available out there but I kind of like my Slack set up, adding only what I need.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanx....

Have yoy run alsaconfig (CLI) Does ALSA recognise your card? If it does then it is supported. At least I would expect it to be.

What's the output of '/sbin/lspci' ?

Here's my lspci -v

Well, it looks like it's being properly detected.

Maybe try running 'alsaconf'.

Yeah I've long since been able to get sound out of my speakers and I have no problems with playback of mp3 or wav files etc..etc..

I'm going to try cracking the case open and play around with the jumpers and such to see what I can get out of that. I'll post back in a little bit to let you guys know how it goes...

I'm going way out on a limb here, but have any other sorts of instruments worked with your existing configuration?

Have you tried piping your bass through a preamp before taking it into the soundcard?

Hi,

You could look at the input signal with a O-scope if you have one.
This would allow you to make sure the signal amplitude is the proper level.

The signal from the source should be within the range and type of the input. The preamp may be your only way to match.

Hi,

One other issue would be the pickup for the guitar. The pickups are generally piezoelectric devices therefore the use of a charge amp within a preamp would be required to provide the signal to the input of the sound system.

I'm not familiar with your sound board with breakout box. Does it have a charge amp for a pickup?

I have successfully done what you are trying to do with a regular integrated sound card and Audacity on a 5 year old laptop running Slackware 11. I've also been successful at the same thing with my Slack 12 desktop. Obviously I'm not doing studio-quality recordings and there are limitations.

The two biggest problems I had in getting this scenario to work were the audio settings for the computer matching the audio settings for the software used to make the recordings and gain.

I was simply using a mono to stereo splitter directly into the line input at first. When I was doing this, the biggest problem I had was that the bass was so incredibly soft and increasing the gain within the software and pumping up the input level made the bass sound crunchy and it was still soft. I wasn't looking for crappy distortion so I had to use a pre-amp (ran it through my regular amp before going into the computer) to equal out the levels as indicated before. If you have active pickups, however, I don't see where you would have a problem. When I switched to six-strings, the only thing I missed about my old 5-string were those awesome active dimarzio pickups...

Anyway, something else I pulled my hair out over was how the audio software was configured. What I had to do was make sure that the proper input device was selected within the alsa settings and then match that setting in Audacity. This ended up being a precise process in matching the levels and I ran into some issues with the software defaulting to /dev/dsp.

As far as the breakout box is concerned, it should work along with the sound card. Is there a setting for it in alsaconfig?

And ...

I have found that some distributions' default settings for ALSA is to have the volume setting for various inputs and output set to zero. I would fire up alsamixergui and see if the microphone input volume is set to zero or it may even be muted.