Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Vinyl Ripping Issue

James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 2009/3/30 Sean Gibbins <sean@???>:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> A bit OT I know but I am hoping that someone somewhere has encountered
>> this issue or at least something similar.
>>
>> Basically I have a Pro-ject Debut II turntable hooked up to a Pro-Ject
>> Phono Box II USB phono stage. This latter device has a USB output that
>> shows up as a Burr-Brown USB DAC when probed by alsaconf or similar. By
>> selecting this device and using audacity or gramofile I can rip vinyl
>> albums and singles to .wav files, for subsequent processing and
>> compression to ogg vorbis audio files. The most convenient and
>> consistent way to do this has proved to be using the following process:
>>
>> 1. boot laptop running Puppy 4.11
>> 2. attach Pro-Ject Phono Box II USB to usb port
>> 3. run alsaconf and select this device as the sound card
>> 4. run [zmixer|alsamixer|sgmixer|...] to set the recording level
>> (although this seems to be totally ineffective)
>> 5. run gramofile
>> 6. record the signal
>> 7. process the signal
>>
>>
>
> You should not need alsaconf.
> Just plug the usb device in and run "alsamixer" (The dumb terminal
> one, not the gui one.)
> Options for startup could be
> alsamixer -c0
> alsamixer -c1
> etc.
> Once you find your usb sound card, try to set all the levels to 0dB gain.
> If it only shows percentage values, you are a bit lost then.

Hi James,

I tried without alsaconf and that fell flat on its face - I could see
that the usb device had been detected but I was unable to record without
the software either (a) simply not working, or (b) getting in a right
state, necessitating a reboot of the machine to clear. I suspect some if
not much of this is down to the peculiarities of running Puppy from a
usb stick - nothing wrong with that as a rule but it may be a bit
'specialised' for this particular application.

Even with the alsaconf workaround the problem appears to be that
alsamixer (or any other mixer for that matter) only shows a playback
slider for this device in the 'playback' and 'all' views; the capture
view is completely blank. This seems a little odd to me given that the
primary, if not sole, purpose of the device is channelling the output
from the phono stage to a digital recorder of some description, i.e. I
could get my head around the opposite scenario.

So, my options seem limited to:
(1) contacting Pro-ject for advice.
(2) taking the output from the phono stage and channelling that through
the line-in socket.
(3) exploring the option of using my Rockboxed iAudio X5 to capture the
output somehow.

Since both 2 and 3 effectively waste the additional £75 I spent on the
phono stage over its non-usb counterpart (which cost me a tenner from a
mate), I'll start with 1 and work down the list!

Sean


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