sence i was so successfull with the mystery sound card, i thought id screw with the tv tuner card. it was a leadtek winfast tv2000 xp deluxe, and an old one. i had mis-identified the card and had assumed it was only compatable with xp and vista. but sence my only xp machine is a ***** to put pci cards into, i decided to risk my ass and install it into my fairly new state of the art gaming rig. i realized what my card really was after the driver i downloaded didnt work. i found a pdf on leadtek's site with board diagrams of the entire tv2000xp line. my card was the old deluxe version, revision 1. which means it was the first of the line and no doubt full of bugs. so i find the right drivers and they installed ok. as it turns out the cards supported 98 (and pretty much every other non-vista windows save 95 and 3.1) and had i had my eyes opened i coulda tested this thing on my junker rig and not risk my 1337 pc.
there was a little test application so i ran the cable to my computer, patched it to the soundcard's line in, and it sorta worked. it was in b&w and no sound. i messed with some settings and got my color, and i changed my xfi over to entertainment mode which worked and i had sound. so that working i installed the actual tuner app, twice, and neither time it would run as it wasnt designed for vista. i scanned google for any forums with people *****ing about the same problem, all with noob *****ers and equally noobier replies. then i went back to the leadtek site for the 10 time, and downloaded a tv tuner app for a newer card. i had assumed it wouldnt work, but i tried it out to make sure and oddly enough it worked, err, witout sound.
now heres the part where i really seriously rip on vista's crappy audio system. rather than ligning up all the ins and outs in the mixer, where manipulating them and muting thim was done all in one pane, and you could toglle to the recording mode and tweak those in the same window, and you could hide levels for things you werent using. they decided to stick another layer in there so you can control sound at the application level. this is of course total crap. rather than having volume controls for each line which was one of the few things i liked about windows, you get a thing that has a sound gauge for each program and theres no link to the thing that lets you control your source lines. that stuff is a show desktop and at least 4 clicks away.
you have to load the sound cp and youre greeted with a list of of misnamed outs, like speakers. it should be called speaker ports because thats what they are. i could just as easily wire them to a dat recorder or a phat stereo system reciever in which case it wouldnt be speakers. to get to the actual levels is yet another 3 clicks away (a single and a double). and what do i see, a scrollbar. the old levels mixer worked without needing any scrolling. seriously were they trying to make this interface more user friendly or were they just trying to boost profits from the customer service line?
anyway i tend to frown on seeing a button for configure and a button for properties on the same window. words like options, and preferences and configure and options all pretty much mean the same thing in every os. so why do i have 2 panes with the same sorta stuff. its all just settings!
they could have put all the options in one spot. you have to hit configure to enable surround mode and props to change the balences. wtf?
to add insult to injury the drm system will garbel your audio id you try to say patch your line in to a line out on another device, such as the patch port on your tv tuner (sence thats what the instructions say to do). and the sad thing is 10 minutes of tweaking can get around it, like telling the system to use it as a microphone instead. tha audio system in vista is a bad design its too convuluted and theres too many panes, and few of them are cross-linked, meaning every pane should have a means to launch related panes. and if such a feature is too hard to implement then you have too many ****ing panes.
now i have a complicated sound system, 2 sound cards, the onboard card and the riser board which is a second device which contains the analog speaker ports and a microcontroller which no doubt also houses the dacs. then i have the xfi because all that other stuff sounds like crap. in addition i have a mic device for my webcam which i never use. the xfi adds another layer of complexity as it heeps settings for each of its modes. having to manually change its mode is rather cumbersome, and is a bad design decision on the part of creative. anyway i spent an hour trying to figure out why entertainemnt mode worked before and didnt now. i changed it over to mic and back to line in and unmuted the line in in speakers and it worked, in a garbeled sorta way, infernal drm wont let me watch the cable tv i spend money on. i switched it over to studio mode and it worked. i finally get my head around vista's crappy audio settings and manage to get it to work in the other modes as well.
and the moral of this story is:
nuke is insane
