Dear Jim,
with Windows there are three main interfaces to the sound subsystem,
two of
them builtin into the opsys itself, and the third produced by a third part.
This latter is called ASIO and is produced by Steinberg :
http://www.steinberg.net/de/index.php
The two Windows-native are the Windows MultiMedia Extensions (WMME) and
the DirectX, each with its pros and cons.
All my sound card programs use the WMME interface (though I am considering
some porting to the ASIO). So, for an USB sound card to be able to be
used with
one of my programs what is needed is a driver that presents a WMME interface
to the application layer. As I don't have an USB card, I cannot tell for
sure if the
accompanying drivers do implement such an interface.
Maybe someone that has e.g. an Creative Audigy/2 card can comment on this.
My feeling is that it should work, as the WMME is used by too many
programs to
be left unsupported by a sound card, but on the other end I have learnt
the hard
way that different persons can (and do) have different perspectives on
what is or
is not logical... especially when marketing is one of the factors at
stake :-(
73 Alberto I2PHD
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James Moritz wrote:
Dear Alberto, LF Group,
Looking at sound cards, I see that external USB modules claiming rather
good specifications seem to be coming available quite cheaply. Is it
possible to use these USB soundcards with SDRadio and the other DSP
programs? Having the sound card in a module external from the PC is
attractive because it should be easier to isolate the audio input from
the generally noisy things going on inside the PC case - I find that
electrical noise from the PC seems to be the limiting factor on SNR
with the sound card I use at the moment.
Cheers, Jim Moritz
73 de M0BMU
.
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