Soundcard as sound input

[Starting User]

Hi everybody.

Is it possible to record audio with the sound card of a Macbook as sound input?

Why would anyone like to do this?! Yes I know, but here's my reason, for those who want to know:

I bought a very fine Studio Album with an additional DVD-Version which contains a 24Bit Mix of the Recording (beside making of videos and other stuff). I want to digitalize those 24 Bit tracks, so I can put the files on my portable music player. Unfortunately one can't direct usual audio copying tools (those that are known to me) to the 24Bit tracks, because one can only play the tracks via navigating to them through the usual DVD Menu which is a bit of a pain. My idea is to create a stereo audio track in a 24Bit Session and set the input of the audio track to the sound card. I tried to do that with my knowledge and it didn't work... (-:

Does somebody have an idea which I could try out, and which might possibly work?

[Phil Ogden]

Without good quality D/A conversion and decent playback equipment, I'm not sure you'll hear the benefit of 24 Bit. However, if you want to give it a go, you could try something like Audio Hijack which records the audio from the specific applications.

[Starting User]

Hi Phil,

thanks for your idea! I could use this Mixer/Audio Interface

http://www.alesis.com/multimix16firewire

as Playback equipment (or do you mean the studio speakers?) and I think when it's configured as sound in- and output in the Pro Tools setup it should do the D/A Conversion as well right. It is 24bit capable as far as I know.

But how to set the DVD sound output as an input for my audio track in Pro Tools?

As for your alternative idea with Audio Hijack, I'm not sure if the programs can handle that properly - do you know for sure how exactly that is for Audio Hijack? I have a copy of Audials Tunebite which can also record the sound card output - but as I said I don't quite trust the quality of it. And would rather do it through Pro Tools, since it's such a nice audio (and midi) sequencer tool. But I don't know whether that's possible or not - I couldn't manage it up to now.

Thanks for your first idea again!

[Phil Ogden]

I suppose you could use that but it seems a bit OTT for what you're trying to do which is output (from DVD) in stereo and record the same. There's no mixing involved as such.

I think you'd need to select the Multimix as the output for whatever you use for DVD playback and, as you say, the Multimix as the input to Pro Tools (Playback engine dropdown).

I am not familiar with the routing on this unit but suspect that the signal will have to come out from digital to analogue and then be converted back into digital. If this is indeed the case, then these additional D/A and A/D conversion stages are negating much of the advantage of going 24 bit.

[Starting User]

I'm afraid you're right. I'll try it out. We'll see whether it's working and making sense or not. Thanks for your help so far!