Fixing a bad audio capture

[Karovaldas]

I have an AverMedia PCI 550 capture/hardware MPEG encoder card hooked up directly to a cable input and am using UltraTV software that came with the product to capture video/audio streams.

Video works great, but audio is captured too loud and almost 50% of the track has peaks cut off. The resulting sound is pretty bad--it's flat, voices are sometimes hard to hear if the ambient sound levles get too high. I think the peaks contain a lot of information about the voice.

I have two questions: fisrst, is there a way that I can fix the audio capture so that audio is normal? I tried reducing the recording gain but it has no effect on the captured sound. It captures via Wave device of the built-in C-Media audio card on the Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum motherboard.

Second, what can I do with the audio stream in post-processing? I normalize it so that the sound level is not too high, but there's gotta be something I can do beyond that to improve the sound quality. I an new to audio formatting, please help.

Thank you.

[Boulder]

Did you try lowering the recording level for line-in in Windows mixer?

[Karovaldas]

Did you try lowering the recording level for line-in in Windows mixer?
Sure did! Whether it is set to MIN or to MAX makes absolutely no difference--same level of distorted sound is recorded.

[Boulder]

Now that's odd. Can you test the line-in jack with any other source, just to make sure it's not faulty.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I had a similar problem with my TV-Card (Hardware MPEG-2 Encoder): The Sound was recorded much too loud, so the audio quality was really bad. The problem was, there was no way to lower the record volume. I finnally found a later driver version, which fixed the problem. Now there is a new registry setting aviable, which allows to lower the record volume. Since I changed that value and rebooted the computer, everything works fine...

Do you have the latest drivers for your Hardware?
Have you checked the doc's for information of how to lower the record-volume?

[Karovaldas]

Now that's odd. Can you test the line-in jack with any other source, just to make sure it's not faulty.

WAVE device, not Line-In is listed as a source for recording and playback. AverMedia techsupport explained that the card passes the audio handling to the soundcard and does not manage it itself. This all goes through the motherboard as the TV Tuner/Encoder card has no Audio-Out jack. Using microphone I can control the levels, and also with various messenger programs it works. I record sound via Premiere all the time without problems.

I did get a new driver from AverMedia which had to do with high quality soundcards. Mine has all kinds of digital inputs and outputs so I believe it is a high-tech device. I installed the driver update but cannot see any difference in performance. Is there a way to verify that it made it to the right place in the registry? Should I change anything in the registry itself?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I did get a new driver from AverMedia which had to do with high quality soundcards. Mine has all kinds of digital inputs and outputs so I believe it is a high-tech device. I installed the driver update but cannot see any difference in performance. Is there a way to verify that it made it to the right place in the registry? Should I change anything in the registry itself?

Only change things in the registry, if you know what you do! If there are any regsitry-settings than can solve your problem, the should be described in the docs that come with your hardware or with the new drive. Maybe there are more information aviable on the AverMedia homepage...

[Boulder]

WAVE device, not Line-In is listed as a source for recording and playback. AverMedia techsupport explained that the card passes the audio handling to the soundcard and does not manage it itself. This all goes through the motherboard as the TV Tuner/Encoder card has no Audio-Out jack. Using microphone I can control the levels, and also with various messenger programs it works. I record sound via Premiere all the time without problems.
Ah, I assumed that you have a cable going from your TV card's line-out to your soundcard's line-in.

Didn't the tech support offer any options for setting the audio level? It could be registry-related, at least that's what it is with Hauppauge's MPEG2 encoder cards.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Ah, I assumed that you have a cable going from your TV card's line-out to your soundcard's line-in.

Didn't the tech support offer any options for setting the audio level? It could be registry-related, at least that's what it is with Hauppauge's MPEG2 encoder cards.

I had the same problem with my Hauppauge MPEG2 encoder card before I installed the new drivers and changed the registry setting. But in that case here it seems like the audio is *not* recorded by the MPEG-Encoder card directly. It's recorded form the Soundcard's Line-In, correct? So normaly everything should be fine, if the sound-card's record volume for "Line-In" is lowered in the volume-control...

[Boulder]

AverMedia techsupport explained that the card passes the audio handling to the soundcard and does not manage it itself. This all goes through the motherboard as the TV Tuner/Encoder card has no Audio-Out jack.

According to this, the audio goes via the capture card and onto the soundcard. It's not possible to use audio out->line-in as he doesn't have an output jack on the card.

As the recording devide is marked as 'wave device' , maybe lowering WAV recording level in the mixer could help.

[Karovaldas]

I tried lowering recording levles on all devices to no avail. Interesting thing that what I do in the TV tuner's program UltraTV registers in the audio mixer and the recording levels do actually go down. No effect on the recording, though.

I guess I am stuck with recording AVI files via Line-In and transcoding them later. The current setup goes from the VCR (which I use as a channel changing box) to TV card and to Audio card separately.

Thanks for all of your help.

[CWR03]

The recording may be done via one of your "Aux" sliders - when you open Volume Control, click Options > Properties, and when you first select Recording you should see a number of listings. Make sure any labeled Aux are checked so they show sliders when you click Ok. There may be "Other" devices you can check and test. I had no idea until I just looked at everything that I had an adjustable EQ setting under Windows volume control.