Dell Sells Hardware Capped Systems

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=270169&highlight=stereo+mix

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=298681&highlight=stereo+mix

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=110255&highlight=stereo+mix

etc... (there are more threads just in the Dell subforums)

What I did to enable Stereo Mix in my XPS M1330 with Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 32 bit:

1) Download this driver for Windows XP from dell.com:

https://support.dell.com/support/do...-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=3&fileid=235761

2) Right-click on downloaded file (R171789.exe), Compatibility tab, check "Windows XP Service Pack 2". Click on Apply.

3) Double click on file and install the new (old) driver.

4) The driver is installed.

5) Go to Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording Tab. Right click on one of the devices and check "Show disconnected devices" and "Show disabled devices" (my Windows is in Spanish, translation is approximate).

6) Select "Stereo Mix" and click on Mark as Default (a green tick should appear with "Working" (Funcionando) next to your device)

7) Enjoy. :GEEK:

8) Confirmed that it works. I have just recorded a song with Adobe Audition that was being played with foobar2000.

9) This may disable protected HDMI or HDCP for Blu-ray movies, but we don't have a Blu-ray player in our XPS M1330, do we?

 

This confirms that it is a software issue, that it is related to Vista and not Dell specifically, and that it can be solved.

To DellCaps: if instead of just fixing the thing, you keep posting here, you will just be confirming the accusations that others (and myself) have made that you are on a personal vendetta here. I am considering reporting this thread to the admins when I get home from work.

 

You should really be looking at external, dedicated sound capture solutions anyways. The soundcards in laptops (esp. consumer laptops) arent going to meet your needs; its already a very electronically noisy environment.

 

Ok. Thanks for the information.


Cin

 

Yup - that's what I did

 

now seems like a good time for the old
/Thread

 

This thread got a 3 star rating???......


Cin.

 

Notice how the guy has stopped replying since like page 3....

 

Yup....I surely noticed that. Bah.

Maybe he will make another appearance, and give us some updates!!!


Cin

 

Maybe he realized that we were on to his plan, lol.

 

Thanks for the info guys! Looks like the XPS 16 is a go.

 

Honestly, I never encountered this issue.
Hmm, might want to check into it.
Then again, I do use and External Sound Card...so I`m all good

 

Me thinks so too!

Congrat's on your impending order!


Cin

 

Actually this a long known issue.

It has been reported in Lenovo forums about a *year* ago...
http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/...l&thread.id=316&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
concerning DELL it has been mentioned for the first time around June 2008, as you can see at gizmodo.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/07/t...ctuers_to_disable_stereo_mix_recording-2.html

Secondly, it is not a DELL issue. It appears to have to do with anti-piracy policies and stuff.

Thirdly it has appeared in notebookreview forums and even in DELL forums at least as back as October. Last answer in this thread dates Jan 16, 2009.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=270169

So no news here...
It is just that the original poster just got his new laptop, and didnt find one of his favorite software.

He is right in saying that this functionnality is gone but as usual (and I have made this mistake personnaly, even in these forums) shouting doesnt help you make your point... On the other hand the attitude of some members here, dismissing what he is saying as wrong without even taking 5 min to do a Google is pathetic. I would like to see what you will do when you will get this kind of replies in an issue important for you...

And as a last point, to my understanding the functionnality disabled is not the ability to record sound in general, but the ability to record the sound that comes out of the speakers!
Meaning that you cannot record by simply clicking an icon at your lappy the sound of your favorite videogame or the Youtube song you are listening. As you can all understand if this is done in order to protect music rights it is actually stupid because you can always do it by hardware methods. And people determined to record music, songs etc will do it. For those who were using it for the fun of it, it is just annoying them...

P.S.
Eleron you have 9999 posts! hehehe! Come on mate, post one more to go to 5 figures!

 

It's not a hardware or software issue, but a driver issue.

If you want to "record the sound that comes out of the speakers", just follow the steps detailed in my last post and enjoy the recovered funcionality.

Another problem is that you lose the middle earphone jack, if anyone cares about it.

But the ability to record the sound that comes out of the speakers is recovered just installing that driver. A proccess that will take you like five minutes, including the download of that 7 MB driver package.

The title of the thread is *wrong*. Dell isn't selling hardware-capped systems, but driver-capped systems.

 

I was about to do it to have this extra feature but... if i'm losing the middle input... I am losing my analog 5.1 surround sound!

If I need to record a sound from my sound card, I'll just plug the output to the input by a 3.5 cable =P

 

If you need to record a sound from your sound card, you can install this driver, record the audio needed and then reinstall the official driver for Vista.

There is no need to reboot when installing the old driver.

 

Bridging the output jack to the input jack is not a good workaround though and it adds two unneeded conversion stages - D-A on the way out and A-D on the way back in again. That's likely to lead to some degradation of the original unless your converters are the dogs bollox. It would be better to bridge the SPDIF out and back in again as then it stays in the digital domain but that's not a easily done.

 

Well I don't know if you remember I told you 2 friends of mine were about to buy other xps and that I had to tell them this, I was in time to tell one who bought a beautiful Sony VAIO instead, and the other one had the "good luck" to have bought already " a new splendid xps 16". IT IS CAPPED. Now he can't play music to his friends through msn, and he's very happy because Dell DIDN'T ACCEPT RETURNING IT because of that. He has sued them cause he lives (is studying) very far from his family and now he can't do what he always did.

 

DellCaps, you do realise that even if there was no Stereo Mix out, you could just plug the Headphone out straight into the Line In and record the same thing right? Or am I reading this wrong?

edit: Sorry, didn't read the thread properly. I see this has already been posted. If you're just streaming sound to other people, the quality loss shouldn't be enough to really matter.

 

Why would anyone want to play music to their friends online? Why not just record something properly, mix it, upload it and then send the link?

 

Sued them, really? I'm going to call bull on this. Go away troll.

 

This is correct. This crippling of the sound card practice has worked it's way to nearly every manufacturer.

Ah yes, the Stereo Mix hacks, that should do the trick, right? Well there's a problem. Record about 4 minutes worth and then listen to the results. Crackle/pop will occure every few seconds. Dell has done something to the record buffers on the sound system, but only while Stereo Mix is being deployed. If you record something at the line in, although you can't monitor it you can record it. It seems that only Stereo Mix will produce recordings with pops.

I love comments like this. At first I thought for sure this could not work because a feedback loop would be created and the sound system would oscilate like crazy. But then it occured to me - maybe this guy is right. Dell has disabled the sound hardware so that it cannot monitor what it is recording. So in their hurry to disable monitoring, they have allowed this trick to work. I tried it myself. I recorded an entire song. No pops or cracks. The levels are a little low, but you can work with that. So as it turns out, Danv is correct. And the second headphone jack on the M1530 comes in handy while using this method. You get to listen and record.

And for all those so quick to try and call out a troll, I don't think that English is the OP's first language. They had a little bit of trouble wording things, but I got the point. Dell has hacked their sound systems, and now that applies to all models (even desktops).

But I believe that they do this with the pin setting of the widgets (driver talk). I have studied the pinouts of the widgets and eventually I will get around to some serious registry hacking. If I find a way to re-route the jacks to working widgets (widgets are the modular units on the sound chip itself that are cappable of either playing sound or recording it) I will post the instructions somewhere.

 

Don't know, but maybe this one helps:


It's a visualization done by
http://helllabs.org/codecgraph/
based on the Linux ALSA HDA driver for the M1330/M1530.

Maybe it's worth trying the flexible linux driver first and if that works try to find out how to convince the Windows driver to do the same.

 

Thanks 7oby. That block diagram is a good road map to go by. And yes, it certainly might be very educating to hack into the Linux driver. I love Linux, however I'm hoping I can avoid having to understand the Linux driver. Instead I'm hoping that I can simply change pin assignments in the driver installation .'inf' file and hack this thing (the STAC9228 or 9205).

 

Not true Just use http://www.asio4all.com/ and you can listen to the recording...
With the ASIO4ALL drivers the latency drops and I can record e.g. from my guitar.
I know the problem here is not to record from an external source, just wanted to clarify the statement

 

Breece, actually my statement is completely true. You should not need any external driver or software to get this functionallity from your line-in.

I'm glad that you like ASIO4all. But this ability to hear what you are recording has existed for the last 20 years in the hardware itself. As we get more 'advanced' with computers the OEM's are actually stripping away features from the hardware. That is the point of this thread.

Furthermore, in order to benefit from ASIO4all you must also have a third party program such as Cubase. That isn't what we're talking about here.

We are talking about hardware, crippled by the manufacturer, and how to reverse it. I have somewhat deep knowledge about this STAC92xx sound card in general. I have spent 1 month with this hardware and studying all of it's registry entries, and studying it's widgets and pin configs. As already stated, I will post something if I manage to hack it.

So just to 'clarify' Breece's misunderstanding, everything that I posted here is most certainly true. In fact, I got the information first hand, while on the phone with someone rather high up the ladder within Dell Corporation. They most certainly have deliberately crippled the STAC92xx sound system.

 

As I stated I know that we are talking about something else... The statement that you cannot monitor what you are recording with your line in is still simply not true... That was the only thing I was referring to.
I can agree with you though, that it should not be necessary to install an additional driver, but it is nice that it is possible.

 

Yes Breece, there is no doubt that with some craftiness you can work around such limitations. It's just ridiculous that we even have to do so. The answer is for these jerks to stop doing what they are doing (OEM's).

People with notebooks from about 4 years ago have awesome DPC latency and record monitoring on line-in built in to their machines. How in the world can any OEM justify their hardware actually performing worse than previous generation? That is completely backwards. These things are supposed to get better with time, not become more handicapped.

You are better off using old notebooks for DAW. I can't believe that this is the state of things. Sure, you can buy an add on card like the Sound Blaster X-Fi (that's what I did), but we are basically being forced into hardware upgrade by Dell.

 

Amen brother...


I hope ASIO4ALL will atleast make it possible to record on my XPS 13... I like to do some home recording with some friends...