Lenovo T400 Stereo Mix

I used to have a dell latitude x300 which I used for line-in recording. I just purchased a Lenovo T400 and I am hearing that it doesn't have the stereo mix option. I wanted to see what my options were. Do the Dell Latitude E4300 laptops have the stereo mix option? I was wondering if I should return my Lenovo and get the Dell instead.

 

Not sure about stereo mix option (will be getting my T400 in a month or so), but why would this be a deal breaker? If you are serious about recording audio in, you should get an external usb or fire wire audio card/interface. There are even some on-usb-stick audio interface cards, I think. Audio recording through any laptop line-in will be "dirty" because there is no good ground isolation and noise will couple in.

 

There's no need to change your entire purchase just based on this function. All you need is to download a small software utility called Virtual Audio Cable.

 

Does Virtual Audio Cable give me the same functionality as having a line-in? Same quality / ease of use, etc?

 

Yeah it does and it works pretty well, too. What machine are you currently using? You can disable the stereo mix option on it and then download the VAC and try it out like that and then compare it to recording something with stereo mix enabled. I'm sure the results will be identical, and definitely better to use VAC than to use a male-male audio cable from line in/line out.

 

I currently use my line-in to record live sound coming in from my mixer. Can you use VAC for that too? The sound quality is very poor if I use the mic-in instead of the line-in.

Also, any idea how much VAC costs?

 

VAC should work perfectly for that and you can easily find a t*rrent for it to avoid the $$$.

 

Thanks Rizwan. They say that the line-in functionality was disabled at the hardware level. Even then you can use VAC to get line-in with the same quality? I wonder how it works if it is disabled at the hardware level.

 

I purchased a T500. I went with a Creative Labs X-Fi sound card that went in the express slot, but these are now hard to find. You can also get USB sound cards too. I expect either of these will work better than the built in options.

 

Yup, it'll still work. Disable stereo mix on your current machine and then dl VAC and give it a try. Should run perfectly.