Dell Issue.... Need Help!

seriouslyme3

Dell officially suck!

I'm a student in audio production so i bought myself a Dell Laptop for college.
I use CoolEdit Pro on my old system at home for doing all my course work.
The problem is i have no microphone option in the sound settings within windows. Meaning i cant hear the mic unless i record from it then play it back.
And i cant record wave sounds period let alone mixed with the microphone.

What do i need to buy or change to fix this?
Its kinda crap having a laptop i bought for college that i cant use for college...

Thanks Guys!

WizZard

seriouslyme3 wrote:

Dell officially suck!

Not really, you didn't research your laptop choice properly.
Dell was a bad choice for a laptop specifically for sound editing!

Why not get an Audigy2 PCMCIA card for the laptop and use that instead. I've heard great things about it.

peterk19

external soundcard is the way to go either a usb or pcmcia, i gotta agree wth WizZard the creative cards are great

seriouslyme3

Anyone know where i might get my hands on one? a PCMCIA one?

hobie

Dell officially suck!

My buddie has just purchased a laptop ... she had an inch thick pad of printouts on specs/performance /reviews/Boards.ie opinions/leaflets etc etc on various alternatives .... :rolleyes:

Her final choice? ........ it was a Dell and she's delighted with it ...

tba

seriouslyme3 wrote:

Anyone know where i might get my hands on one? a PCMCIA one?

komplett
dabs
ebay
peats
maplins

turbot

You have a few other choices;

Firstly using the standard input/output of a laptop with onboard sound card isn't really going to sound that good. There is likely to be at least a little bit of static... and you're hardly going to achieve quality.

As a sound engineer you need to develop your hearing as much as your skills, so it's probably a good idea to get some kind of external sound card, like an extigy... Most of these you can get on ebay for a reasonable price.

Secondly, if you want to monitor the sound as you record it,then you need to listen using reasonably good headphones, watch the EQ and really, using the WAV voume control to achieve this is a crude method at best.

It would be far smarter if you could a Soundcraft Spirit Folio Notepad mixer, and calibrated the output volume of that to go into your laptop, and then inputed the output from the mixer into a good quality sound card.

Understand?

Hobbes

Maybe I am missing something but you have Microphone option on the "Recording" section as you should have.

As for Wave/Synch that is on the playback tab as it should be.

What you are describing is normal for the Volume Control.

The reason you can't hear from the microphone is something else. What audio card you have in the machine? Only time I have seen something like that is half-duplex which was years ago. Other thing to check is if the microphone knows you are using external speakers and is disabling them to stop feedback.