uunet!an-teallach.com!gtoal (Graham Toal) writes:

In article <9308201757.AA04239@soda.berkeley.edu> hughes@soda.berkeley.edu wr

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That said, I think that designing custom hardware for sound sampling is a waste of time, given the abundance of multimedia cards that already work.

Yes, but have you ever tried to drive them from a C program? From the scanty docs I got with my Soundblaster, I wouldn't know where to start.

Sorry I can't provide an exact pointer, but there's a whole newsgroup about it. It *might* be alt.sb.programmer, but I don't actually have a soundblaster, and hence didn't pay a lot of attention. A friend of mine has done quite a bit of soundblaster programming (more about music generation than accepting sound input, tho) and I'll track down the newsgroup name if anyone cares.

Oh, and multimedia cards are pretty expensive. This will cost maybe $25 at most. It's the sort of thing that once designed, hardware-inclined cypherpunks could hack up dozens of at home and pass them on at conventions like HoHoCon or the one we just had in the Netherlands...

Soundblaster clones are (I'm certain) available for $50 retail and I think I've seen them for $35 wholesale. I can find a reference for the retail price, am less sure where I saw the reseller price. None of my comments here are intended to dissuade Graham's uncle from building something useful - I do think it'd be nice to have a public domain (or shareware?) design for a hardware device useful in this context. It is reinventing the wheel, but if the reinvention is (a) fun to do, and/or (b) publicly distributable, it doesn't sound like wasted effort to me. -- Greg Broiles greg@goldenbear.com Golden Bear Computer Consulting +1 503 342 7982 Box 12005 Eugene OR 97440 BBS: +1 503 687 7764