External Sound Card 5.1

[Anthony Small]

Do you mean a device that connects through USB (or possibly FireWire)? Is the purpose to improve the sound output or the sound input (over what the Mac mini already has built in)? What do you need it to do, specificallly?

I am using it as an output device. so I can connect to a mixer board through a USB Port so I can use the ear piece jack to pluck in head phones to Que and preview music. There are several external jacks ranging from $5.00 -$2,000.00. Have you used any?

My experience is with consumer-level devices, not "pro" gear. If I'm understanding correctly, you want to use the built-in sound output jack on the Mac mini with headphones, to monitor ("preview music"), while you use USB to output sound to a "mixer board."

I used a USB device a while back called PowerWave (from Griffin Tech). I could output sound to it, and it acted as an amp to power standard "living room" (not self-powered) speakers. It also had a mini-stereo jack on it, like the one on Mac mini, which could be used with headphones at the same time (I put a self-powered subwoofer on that output). And it also had sound input. It was very cool.

It's sort of a cheaper version of that old PowerWave, with a more limited set of features (no amp). It does provide audio output (and input) from a USB port, and it's relatively inexpensive. But, I'm not sure if you can send sound output to TWO devices at the same time, using standard system settings (if that's important for what you're doing).

Thanks for your input, but this is still not the answer. A sound card is an external device that boost the quality of the sound that you are outputting(i think it boost) but more importantly it allows you to go to the head set and listen to the second channel to que or preview music. It is not like the devise that you are using...dave

you can get a u s b sound adapter. this is not a true sound card.its about the size of a flash drive that plugs into the front u s b port. they usually have a input jack for both a microphone and uses any set of headsets.

yes. i just did it. jaws is playing through the u s b adapter and system sounds through the desktop speakers. i also loaded narrator and it also came through the desktop speakers which is set to my default sound card.

My norns shield is broken, i get a supercollider failure (some issue with the soundcard from the shield). I managed to setup and use my external USB sound card with it, but it is hardcoded, it only works with that (might be a way around, but my lack of knowledge only allowed me to reach that part).

I was about to buy either Behringer UCG102 or Rocksmith Real Tone to get my guitar cheaply and quickly connected to the PC and I was wondering if it wouldn't be better getting an external sound card for about the same price. Of course, I know I won't get professional sound from any of these cheap options. I just want to use Guitar Rig with an acceptably low latency/noise and maybe record some amateur things.

The feature that guitar-specific interfaces will (or should) have in common is a high-impedance input suitable for a guitar's output level, which is necessary to get a good sound when you are plugging your guitar straight in. Some non guitar-specific interfaces may have this too, as well as stereo line-level inputs that would be useful if you ever want to record from another source.

Although it's not a particularly helpful thing to say, there can be some unpredictable results when some devices/drivers just don't seem to get on with some computer hardware - so if there's any way you can somehow try before you buy, that's always a good thing.

As I understand it, a Guitar-USB interface basically is an external soundcard. I think any cheap USB-based solution will suffice and you can still choose which device (USB Vs on-board soundcard) to use for recording and playback.

Both are affordable recording options. However I would recommend the Behringer interface as it allows you to monitor in real time with close to zero latency. That could make a huge difference if you're recording on a average computer that doesn't have the speeds to process the guitar input and play it back through your speakers for monitoring.

Looking to travel so need a very portable setup. Have purchased the reloop buddy to use with my iPad but seems sound card/quality is horrible on larger sound systems directly from controller RCA outs.

Hello everyone!
I would like to ask you for help. I am a newbie and I apologize if the problem has already been discussed but I have not found anything about it.
I have been using EndeavourOS for a few months with satisfaction on my laptop and recently I thought about installing it on my desktop PC too.
Everything works wonderfully but an annoying defect compromises the pleasure of using the system: I have an external Focusrite sound card that turns on and off constantly, generating bumps and strange rustles. It seems that the card turns on only when it has to generate a sound and turns off a few seconds later as if it were going to stand-by.
The fact would not even bother me if everything happened in silence but the noises caused by these continuous switching on and off are unbearable.
I specify that I have encountered the same problem on Manjaro and Arch while this does not occur on Ubuntu-based distro. I thought of a setting in the kernel present on Arch and derivatives, a kind of power saving of the sound card.
I tried to find a solution to disable it but to no avail. Would anyone know how to help me?
Thank you very much, bye!

I've got an external USB sound-card from C-Media running on my RPi3. I can play some recordings using aplay/arecord by specifying the card index and ALSA plugin. However, many other sound files does not play at all, or not as expected. Some other player software does not work either.

It's amazing to see how much effort has been put in to trying to resolvevarious sound related problems for the Raspberry Pi. Apparently it must bethe weakest spot for new users to successfully develop with and use ALSAunder Raspbian. Having spent considerable time and effort trying to get myown RPi3 sound working in different OS versions and in other Linuxdistributions as well, I've decided to write the conclusive to-go-to solutionpage. At least for the topic of using an external sound card on the latestRaspbian Stretch.

ALSA is meant to support any kind of *nix based device, regardless of itshardware configuration and regardless how old is the hardware. Needless,there is little point in trying to get into the details of20 yearsof its development. We simply apply the essence to a current situation.

The first step is to figure out what sound, if any, works and what hardwareyou already have. There are all sorts of ways to find out details, but for theaverage person, most of those details are meaningless. We show the mostimportant.

With RPi's updates there is a constant flow of new changes and improvements,often breaking old solutions. The idea here is to make as few changesto the system as possible or making them obvious if needed. That means,we prefer to use a by-user configuration to a system wide one. I.e. you should tryto use configuration files in your home directory, rather than in rootowned system files.

Here we see that the system default (card 0) is using the bcm2835 ALSA module.Although we can usually specify what card to use, some software like omxplayerdoesn't have this option, and will fail to produce any sound in various ways.

At this point you could already attempt to configure your ALSA config files.Some are successful, while many others aren't because it is not obvious howand where this should be done. What we ultimately want, is to tell our systemto use our external USB sound card.

Unless you have very good reasons to keep PulseAudio (PA) oradditional JACK server software, you should uninstall them,if they are there. They tend to interfere with ALSA, as they take controlof many ALSA functions, and all the additional configurations necessaryby those make things incredibly confusing!

If for some reason, you prefer to use method (2), then you need toblacklist the kernel module. To do this, you simply enter the theword blacklist, followed by name of the module in any *.conf fileunder /etc/modprobe.d/. However, there is already an empty, reservedfile there, called raspi-blacklist.conf for this purpose. However,after 6 months, you will have forgotten about this, and what itcontains, so you are better off naming it after the module you areblacklisting.

As I already mentioned, we want ALSA to use our own USB sound card asthe default. This also means that we want it to have the first availableindex in the list of the kernel sound modules. Since the module wasremoved above and the index is the same (card 1), we are good. But incase we need to load bcm2835 again, we are not, as that module wouldre-appear as the first one (card 0).

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