RealTek AC97 Sound Card (Chip)

Thanks millerbill.

I have the onboard RealTek AC 97 soundcard. For general computer functions it worked just fine. But using it for recording digital audio is another story. The problem I was having was that when recording through the mic it would pick up the other audio tracks and bleed through to the recording track. It was faint but very noticeable. And it wasn't because of the mic picking up sound from the speakers. It would even do it when I disconnected the mic. Also the Realtek doesn't have a MIDI interface.

Anyway, after over a week of trying to solve the problem, I finally gave up and installed a Riptide Conexant Audio soundcard that I swiped from an older computer I wasn't using. Although the MIDI was working fine it had its own problems recording audio and I finally just recently broke down and purchased a Delta66 which seems to be working perfectly. I use the Delta for audio and the Riptide for Midi. I have disabled the RealTek audio.

Anyway getting back to the RealTek, after searching all over the net I discovered that many others were also having problems with their RealTek AC 97 soundcards. There seemed to be an abundance of problems and mine was only one of the many. I'm convinced that there is no solution to these problems and it's just best to get a different soundcard if your computer has one of these RealTeks.

Just my 2 cents.

The shame of it all is that, apparently, even high end laptops from manufacturers such as Toshiba seem to always ship with the on-board AC97 chip set as the sound card. I had a Toshiba that, as detailed in my earlier posts, promptle stoped working a few days after the 12 month warranty was up. In dealing with the AC97 chipset, I found that with MME drivers selected, MC was completely unusable, as the latency level that one would be able to achieve without dropouts was very high. Since the Toshiba laptop that I had had one of fastest Wintel laptop processors available, I could only conclude that it was a driver/chipset issue. I did contact RelTek directly (speaking Chinese helped me with that - they're in Taiwan) and the sent the latest WDM driver to me. That apparently helped the latency and performance issues but, as noted by Millerbill, the AC97 chipset apparently does not independently support MIDI - so I lost MIDI usage as a tradeoff.

In general, if you are going to do music on a laptop, you have to go into it knowing that the on-board chipset is unusable and should plan on buying an external audio/MIDI interface and overriding the chipset OR buy an Apple Powerbook.

One must remember that these are after all sound cards! Not recording interfaces, we must face teh fact that if we want pro or close to it results. we need to gear up and buy products designed for what we want to do.

bump

Well, I'm recording my music on a separate Boss component. I really only wanted the Music Creator 3 for mastering. The conflicts I'm having with the Realtek AC97 don't have anything to do with sound quality in recording or playback. The thing that irritates me is that the folks that wrote the Music Creator 3 software should be aware of the fact that most new laptops ship with a Realtek AC97 or similar soundcard. I shouldn't have to be a programmer to make their software work!?!

I hear ya millerbill but my Boss component is a separate component that records and then creates wav files and then transfers them over on a USB cable. It's a digital recorder. There's no conflict there.

The conflict appears to be with my sound card but I can't figure it out. My laptop is only 6 months old and I've never had any problems with it. I've bought other software programs for various other reasons and you load them up and they work. They have built in mechanisms to deal with conflicts and I am able to run them. This is the first problem like this that I've ever had with this laptop or a software program. I've gotten two responses from tech support that took 3 & 5 days respectively to get back.

See the CAKEWALK (NOT RESPONDING) thread. I'm not the only one with frustrating unresolved sound card conflicts.