Mixer works, but what a headache.

[Brutish Sailor]

Ok, its 3:00 AM and I have work in 3 hours, but I got it working.

I bought a Behringer Xeynx 800 mixer just to bring land line callers on the air.

Still cant do the live caller thing, but at least I have the mixer working. It really made me mad because I had to:

1) Take an hour of troubleshooting to realize the line in was the same line as the mic on my sound card (soundblaster audigy SE) ((Yes, the diagrams refer to this plug as the "mic or line in")). Ran down to Radio shack to buy an adapter.

2) Another hour to realize that the "line" input listed in sound blaster audigy software interface is general , and it has to be set on mic to use my mixer.

3) 2 hours to figure out the knobs.

4) 2 hours to figure out that the bleeding distortion sound in my audio is because I have to run a line into my mixer and out for stereo from comp set as the source. Unless I want to click back and forth from sources, and I usually notice a crash about the first to third swap.

5) Head back to wall mart to buy a phone with a headset jack

6) set up the phone and realize that it has a small 1/16 jack like mobile phones.

Im done for the night. Tomorrow I will fid a 1/16 to 1/8 adaptor for it( I know they exsist, because I used to listen to my nokia 5300 all the time through the speakers)

It would be SOOOO much easier to buy a telephone coupler, but the thought of paying $50 for a device that does ONLY that just doesn't appeal to me. I needed new phones anyway.

In case your wandering how I'm going to interface with the caller if the phone is plugged into the speakers via mixer, the nice thing about this is its on a land line. So Im on one phone, the other phone is plugged into the speakers, and that should give me two way interface broadcasting.

Why not use skype? Using a computer with 512 MB of DD ram, and I need ALL the processor I can get. Time to upgrade RAM real soon. Just to save you the trouble: Yes, I know its time to upgrade the comp.

Plus I realized the potential of an external mixer. 4 channels can do a lot for a cheap micro caster.


Fire away feedback at will.

[Greg_E]

Don't own the sound card, can't help there, but something doesn't seem correct.

Buy the phone coupler... There is a lot more going on in there than just providing audio in and out. In order to keep the feedback and other annoying interactions down, you need to be able to separate the caller from the return mix, this is one thing that a good hybrid will do. Consider buying a better analog hybrid on ebay, they can be had for under $100 and will work and sound better than a $50 new interface.

If you simply want to couple the phone to a line input, all you needed was a cheap little green 600:600 ohm transformer from Radio Shack, and a .1 microfarad capacitor. Connect one side directly to the phone line pair (side with the cap to block the DC), the other side to a line input on the mixer. Will probably work as well as a headset connection.

code:


                +  -     _____________

+----------------||-----|            |------------

phone line              |transformer |  line input

------------------------|____________|------------

Sorry, best I can do with text.

The || is the capacitor that is used to block the DC so that it doesn't saturate the transformer, needs to be over 100 volts or it could pop. Remove the telephone handset while using this because all audio goes through the line and the handset can be distracting. This device is really only good for one way audio, for two way audio you really need a hybrid or at least speaker phone so that one side gets cut off while the other is sending audio.

[Brutish Sailor]

I love radio shack. Its a sad thing, because back in the day, in my teen years, I could walk in and say I want to build a strobe light, and they would have build sets to recommend, and parts to enhance it. Now adays you walk in and say "I want some stuff to enhance digital radio performance." and they will scratch their heads, and then try to sell you a phone and GPS that links to it.

For a place called radio shack, they don't carry much in the way of radio.

[Brutish Sailor]

I'll try moding a line today.

If it works, expect a U-tube video to follow.

[Greg_E]

There are schematics on the web for a few decent analog phone hybrids, never built any but it might be worth your while. Wouldn't surprise me if you could find a nice digital hybrid design that could be built for under $50 in parts.

[Brutish Sailor]

The one thing I don't understand is this.

So I am still playing music in winamp. I do the what-U-hear setup. Now I have a line running from my stereo out of my soundcard to what we will call "line in 4" on my mixer. NOW I use that channel to adjust volume for music. Then another channel to adjust my mic, and one other to do the phone line in.

So, Im guessing what-you-hear would go RIGHT out the window, because all my source would be on the "line in or mic" for my soundcard. otherwise I would get a REALLY BAD distortions/reverb from my sound because you have the audio from the source playing in a channel, AND in another channel for the mixer itself.

[Greg_E]

Would be best if you can scare up another computer to serve as a playback machine running Zara or SAM.

[Brutish Sailor]

http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/...hp/t11853.html

these guys had the same idea I did.

[Brutish Sailor]

Greg I know your right on this. A TON of less headache would be there.

[Brutish Sailor]

http://www.syndication.digitalspy.co...d.php?t=930211 some good ideas, Im trying to look into the method posted at the bottom of the page, referred to as the "Peter Blue" method.

[Greg_E]

OK, that first link has someone with the problem that I mentioned, you will get both you and the listener on the phone line and it could cause problems. If you use a cell phone, they might be reduced because of the way most carriers operate the service.

What you need to be able to do is feed a mix minus the caller to the phone, that way the caller does not hear themselves (with a small delay), this is appropriately called mix minus. You also need to only receive the caller audio. What the hybrid does is to take your mix or mix minus and couple it to the phone line, while nulling out the caller audio that returns on the line. On the output side it is also doing this same thing in reverse to provide good clean caller audio to the mixer.

Lacking a mix minus bus, you would want to send your microphone on an aux send to the telephone (prefader). Now what you can do is talk to the person on the phone through the phone channel so that both of you come through that channel. Not perfect, not hifi, but can be done with the simple transformer device that I showed above. Everyone in broadcast engineering should have a phone that can simply couple audio like this, I've used mine for a large number of different things over the years, though it is getting difficult to find phones old enough to modify like this to get all the benefits.

Alternate to the second compter, can you run two instances of Winamp? One that sends the audio out of the soundcard, another that takes audio back in from the input. What about a second cheapo sound card for the input (or onboard sound)? Then the DSP could use the second audio device for the input and you should be fine.

[Brutish Sailor]

Well Greg, I think your right, but I got a low budget solution.

Its not a hybrid, but its a start.

I found a a coupler at radiochack that hooks to the handset to channel used for recording. Its used to record, but looking at the diagram, it does what your diagram sets up. Going to try to modify it to make a hybrid. Im pissed because it hooks to a HAND SET, meaning it has to be wired between a corded phone base and the receiver. the jacks are too small to fit a regular line in.

If all else fails, out comes the low temp sodering iron.

Nothing a salvation army stop cant fix. plus it was $17 to purchase. 3 bucks for the 1/8 stereo to 1/4 stereo connector.

I also bought a 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm just to try the first articles setup.

LOL, If it works, I'm going to have to give you a call sometime and shoot the BS with you. I have a couple of DJ's that this caught the interest of, and this would be a good show topic for them. A talk show on shoutcast about shoutcast for the micro caster LOL.


Edit: Tried the first idea, and it worked like a champ!

We have to run a show to bs about this sometime. Im interested in picking your brain a bit.

[Brutish Sailor]

Like a champ. I'm going to try to take winamp to a bare bone to make two music programs run at once. The question is how to source to which channel.


Just got to decide which winamp 5.5 plug-ins to throw out to preserve CPU usage.

Hot keys went out the window. Looking for all the programs I could do without for CPU preservation.


I dont know WHAT IT IS, but I took down the CPU usage for less frames on the default skin plug in, and went from %20 usage to %8. Clicked the skin and started moving it around, and my CPU spiked to %90.

[Greg_E]

If you don't mind, picking of brains works better for everyone if it is in posts. That way other people can search for the info and make use of it too.

http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/teleinterface.html

About in the middle of the page they get into active op amp based hybrids, this is where you want to be going. if you spend some time looking around, you can probably find a design that will be easy and cheap to build, and will give you really pretty decent performance if you spin the null controls properly (gain pots on the op amps). The digital hybrids go one step farther by automatically adjusting this null to give you the best performance.

[Greg_E]

You want the classic skin! Made a huge difference on my old tablet PC.

[Brutish Sailor]

I have one channel left, and that going to be from line out on the soundcard to mixer.

This is where its going to get tricky, because I dont know if a lot of answers .

1) Will metadata for now playing still transfer for the tracking servers? It should, Im sure.

2) OK. SO lets say the music is coming off my soundcard to my mixer, and back into my soundcard. This isnt going to work. Music has to be sourced to the mixer. THEN to broadcast from the...... I'll have try it, but I think Im going to have some CRAZY reverb..... I cant question until I try it, I fear no processing, may the llama be with me. It might work because Im using line output from the source to my mixer, then if I use the Mic/line input from the mixer back to the soundcard, I technically never crossed sources. I'll try it and see.

3) So now I have to buy some adaptors, for my main out to my stereo. I hope thats right.

If this does all work this will be sweet, because that means I will be able to tweak all my sources from knob interface.

[Brutish Sailor]

And I'm sure if I turn on phantom power, I will probably fry everything correct? Their isn't really much in the manual for computer interface, but this the mixer included in the Behringer podcast kit. One of the reasons I picked it.

but +48 Volts cannot be a very good thing.

[Greg_E]

I do not think you will have the metadata from the songs when using Winamp as the playlist, and another Winamp as the encoder. I might be wrong, but not too likely. Maybe one of the Winamp wizards will read this and have a good solution, I can't use it for anything put playback of the streams because of the metadata issues.

I think you may need to look into SAM broadcaster, I'm pretty sure it will give you the line out you need, plus the line in from the mixer, and will put the metadata back onto the songs. Alternate might be the SimpleCast encoder which could probably take the metadata from Zara and put it on the stream, not positive so it might be worth checking.

Hopefully phantom power only goes to the XLR connector and it should never be able to damage a real microphone. If it also goes to the line level inputs, then problems may happen since you are dealing with a bunch of unbalanced equipment. If you do not need it to power up your microphone, then leave it off.

[Brutish Sailor]

I see what you are saying Greg. By therory, all is not lost here. Just kinda up in the air.

I realized what didn't add up in my head here. Because I would be using the soundcard line out as a channel, I don't need to set it to "what-U-hear" because that channel on my mixer IS "what-U-hear"

So the reason that I am sure I would have a bad output is if I set it to MIC, Then talk into the mic, my soundcard in would be getting input through my MIC and my "What-U-Hear" channel on the mixer. Got to be a way around this.

As far as running two apps of winamp, brilliant! This would work, I just need to figure out a way to transfer metadata.

I tried swapping the source back and forth, and about the second time I clicked Winamp to swap, my program froze and crashed like it was lost island.