building a sound sampler for cryptophone application...

[greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)]

uunet!an-teallach.com!gtoal (Graham Toal) writes:

> In article <9308201757.AA04239@soda.berkeley.edu> hughes@soda.berkeley.edu wr
>  > That said, I think that designing custom hardware for sound sampling
>  > is a waste of time, given the abundance of multimedia cards that
>  > already work.
>  
> Yes, but have you ever tried to drive them from a C program?  From the
> scanty docs I got with my Soundblaster, I wouldn't know where to start.

Sorry I can't provide an exact pointer, but there's a whole newsgroup about 
it. It *might* be alt.sb.programmer, but I don't actually have a 
soundblaster, and hence didn't pay a lot of attention. A friend of mine has 
done quite a bit of soundblaster programming (more about music generation 
than accepting sound input, tho) and I'll track down the newsgroup name if 
anyone cares.

> Oh, and multimedia cards are pretty expensive.  This will cost maybe $25
> at most.  It's the sort of thing that once designed, hardware-inclined
> cypherpunks could hack up dozens of at home and pass them on at 
> conventions like HoHoCon or the one we just had in the Netherlands...

Soundblaster clones are (I'm certain) available for $50 retail and I think 
I've seen them for $35 wholesale. I can find a reference for the retail 
price, am less sure where I saw the reseller price.

None of my comments here are intended to dissuade Graham's uncle from 
building something useful - I do think it'd be nice to have a public domain 
(or shareware?) design for a hardware device useful in this context. It is 
reinventing the wheel, but if the reinvention is (a) fun to do, and/or (b) 
publicly distributable, it doesn't sound like wasted effort to me.


--
Greg Broiles                            greg@goldenbear.com
Golden Bear Computer Consulting         +1 503 342 7982
Box 12005 Eugene OR 97440               BBS: +1 503 687 7764