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Re: iMic noise

Subject: Re: iMic noise
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 11:35:47 -0400
Nick Gordon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I use the iMic to transfer an MD recording to my cube G4. The iMic i 
> think is picking up a sorts of disturbance and shielding it whit 
> alluminium foil does not help anything. After packing it and moving it 
> around a bit it picks up just the same level of noise as before.
> When I listen sound back from the minidisk it sounds acceptable to me, 
> using a pair of SoundMan binaurals the sound has tremendous space and 
> fairly natural sound where the low selfnoise is acceptable to me for 
> now.
> But I can't get it into the cube. Also I use Macromedia soundEdit to 
> record it to disk. This program has some trouble under OSX.2 as it is 
> producing al sorts of dips to the speakers where these dips are not 
> really in the SoundEdit file for as I play it back whit QuickTime there 
> are no dips.

I've not used one of the cubes. It sounds to me like you may be getting 
interference from other events going on in the cube. You can try 
shutting down all other programs and processes you can. But I'm not sure 
that's going to entirely do it. I've noticed with some sound playing 
software on my regular G4 that disk accesses and such like can create 
something like what you describe. My regular sound editing programs, 
Peak and Spark XL do fine, but some of the CD playing software exhibits 
this. And I'm running OS 9.2, unix (which is what OSX is) can create 
more interrupts than the mac OS does.

As you noted QuickTime does better, probably because it's processes have 
a higher priority suppressing the interrupts. If stopping all the 
processes you can does not do it, you may simply have to give up on 
SoundEdit for playback. Or check with the company and see if they have 
any suggestions.

Part of the problem seems to be that the main processor is involved more 
in sound playing than it used to be. It used to be you could crash a AV 
mac and the sound would keep right on playing because it was not going 
through the processor. Not true anymore. And probably especially so with 
the cube, which is a cut down form of a mac.

> Can anyone confirm these issues? I figured that if the recording was 
> okee it would not be such a big step anymore to get the sound on the 
> road, but I guess i'm wrong. How can I bypass and overcome these 
> obstacles.

If the problem is in input, then the use of a external A/D in the form 
of one of the USB devices may help. And the use of a regular sound 
program instead of iMic may help too. Peak is what a lot of mac folks 
use, including myself. I'm currently transferring digitally from my 
Portadisc via a Roland UA-30, so don't know the current issues with 
analog transfers. I have done analog inputs with my G4 in the past using 
Peak with no problems.

Walt




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