Monday, April 9, 2007

How to record HD audio with Conexant HD Audio




You've got a so call HD Audio card from conexant or intel. But what the heck does that mean? Well, it means that internal sound cards don't completely suck anymore. Do you want to record really high quality (well, as high as an integrated card can offer...) audio without spending a fortune on an M-Audio shenanigan? Here's How you do it:

  1. Download the excellent free software called Audacity.
  2. Make sure you have the latest Conexant or Intel drivers.
  3. Go into Control Panel and select sound.
  4. Click on the recording tab.
  5. Choose Microphone and right click, and choose properties.
  6. Go to advanced and choose 2 Channel, 24 bit, 96000hz (Studio Quality).
  7. Click apply.
  8. Open Audacity
  9. Look in the lower left corner where it says 44000hz, click and choose 96000hz.
  10. Record!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, thanks for the post.

The conexant works fine on my notebook for recording from the built in microphone. But the conexant has a huge flaw that it cannot record anything from your sound card, i.e., your can't record streaming music or whatever being played. Any idea?

Unknown said...

The instructions above didn't work for me. I was able to change the settings as described but Audacity still records silence when I am playing a sound file through the Conexant HD audio driver.

So I agree with Ringo - the Conexant just isn't set up to record from the sound card. If it was, I would see 'Stereo mix' or 'WAV' (or similar) as an option in Control panel > Hardware & sound > Manage audio devices > Recording. There it clearly shows that my only recording device is the Conexant microphone.

My old DELL laptop had a Crystal sound card with both Microphone and Stereo mix options. I successfully made plenty of recordings of sound files and streamed sound with both Audacity (free) and PolderbitS (not free but better quality, reliable features and easy to use).

Unknown said...

PS - Check out these reports from the manufacturers:

http://www.stereo-mix.com/category/stereo-mix-issues

Technical limitation:
"Conexant does not plan to build powerful driver support for Stereo mix. Therefore, its recording feature is very limited."

Legal limitation:
"Sony states that 'Stereo Mix' on Vaio will not be enabled. It has been disabled in Vista to prevent the possibility that people may use it to illegally record sound. It is not just Sony that have had to do it, but all manufacturers."

Hmm, maybe I just have to go back to my old DELL running WinXP ...