Trying to use a microphone

I’m trying a cheap USB soundcard (very cheap, but functional) and Renoise will recognise it for output, but seems to not like it for input. Here is what I get when I try to select it in Edit//Preferences:

Failed to open the ALSA capture device ‘hw:1,0 (USB Audio)’: The device provides fewer than 2 input channels and thus cannot be used in Renoise.


Is it because it’s mono? I don’t care about that. Is there some way of accepting a mono input?

Alsa - you’re using Linux? Try using Jack as a workaround for your problem. I do it that way with an usb mic. You’ll even get nice realtime stability if your system is configured right, and interoperability with other progs, and the possibility to use multiple devices at the same time as a side effect.

With Jack you can config the number input/output channels, and just connect to your Renoise inputs, i.e. plug the mono mic to both ports of a stereo input. Be aware that multiple soundcards can differ slightly in clocks, but jack features tool (alsa_in/alsa_out) for compensating that - so if you’d like to use the usb thing in parallel to another soundcard, you’d better set up scripts to load cards via that route. I don’t know for sure if jack does the resampling automatically when using multiple devices, though. Also it needs a bit of fiddling to get it into optimal state and best possible latency, expecially when you want to monitor effected signals on another soundchip than the mic is plugged in. For tests I just load the mic additionally to my main soundcard, if I seriously want to record something I deliberately do it the other way round, so the recorded signal isn’t resampled (the monitors will be resampled then as a compromise, but that’s “volatile” sound that isn’t recorded).

If renoise won’t accept mono inputs (huh - most mics are mono, aren’t they, so why should renoise not support it?), and you want to use only the usb card but not jack, maybe you could do .asoundrc magic to double the input ports to stereo in a meta device. But I think renoise won’t accept text input for alsa device selection, so this device couldn’t be chosen anyways?

Thanks.

I’ll try fiddling around with jack once I have a new microphone. As you may have read in another topic, I discovered that rodents snacked on my microphone cord.