I got up early again, 9 something.

There's nothing to have on my cereal, only the manky milk that was in the fridge for 8 hours while it wasn't plugged in. Not consuming that.

I ate dry rice bubbles.

I mucked around on the computer a bit more, trying to get the multichannel stuff going.

I'd managed to download a copy of the n-track thing overnight. I installed it on one of my windows machines.

While reading yesterday, I'd realised that I can use the line input on a single card, for 2 mono devices (which is what our guitars/microphones are anyway).

I looked in the Jaycar catalog to find splitter cables and stuff, yeah, I can do that, 3.5mm -> 2x rca sockets, and then an rca -> 6.5mm socket in each rca will allow for a guitar and a mic etc in the line in.

I also looked in there for switches, to get something to replace the dud one in my mate's Marshall amp's foot controller. I found this one, here.

It's exactly the same on top, just the solder tabs are a different design, but who cares about that.

I went out to Jaycar, bought 2 sets of those, if I can get 2 cards going, there's 4 devices, and that's enough (we've only got 2 guitars and the drums). I got an extension cable and a 3.5mm -> 2x rca cable, so I can use my guitar amp as the speakers for the pc, and I also got the replacement switch.

I came home again, got fuel on the way, because otherwise I'll end up running out before I make it to the service station on my way to work tomorrow, and then I came home.

I mucked around with the pc again, plugged in the splitter cables, adapters, the microphone and the guitar.

The input level is pretty poor though.

I did a couple of test records, couldn't hear anything much on the playback, something's dodgy. (I know the 6.5mm socket on the guitar isn't great, has a couple of dead spots, but it's being really pedantic now).

I found about a command line recording thing, ecarecord I think it is, which supports specifying the device, and ALSA devices.

Perhaps I can just write a shell script to kick off 3 or 4 instances of that, each using a different card/input as the source, and then import the wave files into something later.

I started downloading that, and then my mate called me, and said he be there shortly, so I got off the phone, and packed everything up to go.

I burned a cd with the software I'd managed to download, to muck around on my mate's pc, and asee if we could get something to multicard record.

He turned up a while later, I jumped in the car, and we went to my mate's place.

We set the gear up, my mate went to have a shower, I moved his pc back to the loungeroom. I put the extra card in it (had left the one I put in yesterday in there). Now there's 4 sound devices in his pc, onboard sound (shit, disabled) a creative sb128 card I gave him, and 2 of the cheapy CMI cards I bought at the fair.

I went to install the software, but my mate has a password on his xp account, and I didn't have my NT password change disk with me, or I would have just changed it.

He came out of the shower at that point, and logged in, I started installing the software.

I mucked around, configured it, but couldn't get any input level, it was wierd.

I tried checking the recording levels/selections, I could access the settings of the first CMI card, but the second one, only had "recording" as a valid selection in the mixer properties, it showed no controls, and I couldn't click ok on it.

Something's buggered up here.

I went back, mucked around with the settings in n-track again, not getting anywhere. Selected the SB card as an input, that worked slightly.

I thought perhaps the driver cd would have some sort of mixer application, and bypass the broken windows one. I installed the applications. During the install, the directx installation crashed. I tried to run the 3rd party mixer, but it wouldn't launch.

I rebooted the PC, it didn't boot back up. Got past the XP starting screen, and when it should have displayed the login screen, it just did nothing, and the machine locked up.

I powered it off, took the card out, booted up, no good. Reset it. booted in "Last known good config", that came up. I shutdown, put the card in again, didn't boot. Took it out, still didn't boot. Tried last known good config again, nope, broken.

Tried booting a few more times, not getting anywhere. Took the first CMI card out, now it's back to the original config, and this time it booted.

We mucked around for a bit, and I setup cakewalk to use left/right of the input on the creative card, but the microphones had bugger all volume, I'm pretty sure you have to have a mic in the mic input, not the line in, but my mate says he's done it before.

I plyed around with that for a bit, I put my guitar amp in the line in, that was ok.

We recorded some stuff, but the volume was useless.

We decided to go and get some lunch, it was nearly 3pm.

We went to Hungry Jacks, bought food, and went back to my mate's place and ate.

We had another go with the pc, eventually I tried the mic in the mic input, that was fine, and the volume was what my mate had before, so he hadn't been using the mic in the line in.

The mic input is only mono too, so there goes the idea of the splitter for 2 devices/card.

Argh. I gave up, we put one mic in the mic input, and set it up in the middle of the room, and all moved in close to it.

We jammed for a while, testing the recording, it wasn't too bad for line levels.

We practiced a few songs, Led Zep's Sick Again, The Beatles' Day Tripper, and Come Together, U2's Vertigo.

Then we just started mucking around, and ended up doing some 15 minute song we just made up.

We listened to the playbacks, it wasn't too bad. The lead guitar was a bit loud, and the microphone's frequency response is pretty poor (the drums sound really tinny), but it didn't have too much distortion.

It's too bad that it's only 1 channel, and we couldn't mix it. I still might get a copy, chop it down a bit, and play it at work, see if anyone asks who it is :-)

My mate who picked me up wanted to go home (it was now after 6pm), so I packed up all my junk, grabbed all my cables etc, and the 2 cards I'd had to take out of my mate's pc (i'll try to get 4 cards going in the linux box), and then loaded up the car.

As we were going out to the car, I suggested that if we use a preamp on the microphones, we could then put them in the line in. Now I'll have to find some sort of a stereo preamp, so I can run 2 mics into it, then then split the output, and put it back into the same line in as left/right.

My mate headed for my place, on the way we went to the bottleshop, and I got another 6 pack.

He dropped me at home, about 7pm, I dragged all the stuff in.

I sat and had a can, and then realised there's no food. Oh well, there's some dried fruit there, that'll have to do for dinner.

I thought about mucking around with the linux box, trying to fix the alsa config for the virtual sound card, or writing the shell script for the multitrack recording program to kick off against each card, or imaging the 200gb disk I bought a week ago for the tivo, but instead I've sat here for the last 2 1/2 hours blogging.

I browsed around the net a bit, reading about alsa stuff, and using multiple sound cards. I tried a few different configurations of the asoundrc file, to make a virtual multichannel sound card, but then I couldn't find any software that supported the alsa/jack interface directly, they wanted to use /dev/dsp, and I can't find a way to make that into the virtual multichannel device.

I found another program, ecasound, it will allow you to specify an alsa device to use as the source, so I could probably just run 3 or 4 copies of that simultaneously, streaming different inputs to separate files.

I kept coming across references to using different cards being a waste of time, because the crystals won't be the same, and the recording will get out sync.

I had been wondering if it would be possible to remove the crystals from all the cards, solder wires on to on of them, and connect it to all four cards, but I'm not sure if crystals work that way.

I found a link in a forum about alsa, to a page on geocities, which described exactly that, remove the crystals from all but one card, and then daisy chain all the cards of that one card.

It said that it wasn't terrific though, it could take a few goes to get jackd to start without erroring, and sometimes a couple of reboots, but once it started, it was fine, and the guy had recorded 6 channels for 10 hours, and it stayed in sync.

Ah, I just found a mirror of the page here.

I think I've got everything to do it. I might go and buy some pin headers though, instead of hard wiring the cards together. I could get extra sockets, and put the crystals I remove in them, and then I can change the cards back to standalone if I need to.

I mucked around with software configs until about 12.30am, and then went to bed.