Okay, heres the deal,

if you havent been paying attention, my computer DIED IN A HORRIBLE WAY AND CANNOT BE REPAIRED (EIDE CONTROLLER FAILURE)

====Technical CRAP begins here====

SO i built a pc out of scrap parts i had lying around the place and wound up with a system that runs a 333Mhz CYRIX, has 256Mb ram, 260Gb HD space and it also boasts ISA SLOTS (i wish they would still include at least one of these on newer boards :[ )

SO sense i wont be able to do any real music synthesis with this HORRIBLY SLOW COMPUTER i figured i would do the next best thing,

i put 1 of those ISA slots to good use and installed an 18 year old
8-bit ISA SOUND BLASTER 2.0 card (CT1350B)
that has half-duplex operation and a horribly low sampling rate with no anti-aliasing filter, WHY WOULD I GO AND DO SOMETHIGN THAT STUPID WHEN I HAVE A NEWER CARD SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO ME?!

Because it has a YAMAHA YM3812 chip it uses to synthesize MIDI

OH JOY

this card came out before computers were plagued with the horrible "WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS" chips that consumer grade sound cards use today,

it actually HAD a synthesizer in it,

(and ps i installed both sound cards, the sound blaster 2.0 for midi and the AW840 Cobra for normal usage, im not THAT crazy)

heres the deal:

this computer is WAYYYY to slow to multitask,
so instead of loopbacking the soundblaster to the Cobra and recording one off the other in real time (which failed horribly) i had to improvise,

i pluged the line out of the sound blaster into the line in of my NAKAMICHI 500 Tape Deck (it truely kicks ass)
and i recorded it to tape, then i played it back from tape into the COBRA cards line in and recorded it with audacity,

somewhere i screwed up and lost the left channel of sound, oh well.

the recording is very noisy and there is a good reason for that,
the component layout (and the components themselfs) on the sound blaster are arranged horribly from a technical point of view,
there is no ground plane on the board nor any sheilding,
so it picks up all the noise from inside the pc, (Fans, Hard disk activity, mouse movement, video signals, everything)

i have been thinking about getting down and dirty and building a
Faraday Cage (RF sheild) around the card but am worried i will screw up and short it out,

i used the faders on the tape deck at the end, and forgot to trim off the beginning in audacity, so there is a short delay there before the music starts.

====END OF TECHNICAL CRAP====

in short, this is my setup till i build a new pc
using a mobo im getting off my dad soon

-short description-

this is just a little something i sequenced to get some practice in and to see what i can do with this sound card ^_^

read the technical crap if you want to know the hell i went through just to record this.

=====UPDATE=====

i swapped out the sound blaster 2.0 for some card called an
"Aztec Sound Galaxy Washington" (whoever the hell named that needs shot)

this card has a better signal to noise ratio, sheilding, and instead of the YM3812 it has the YM262 (the immediate successor)
and this version is in STEREO, it also removes some of the pops and studders, i used a different tape deck this time, a Sony TC-WR661
and used its "auto record level" function, and it worked out nicely,

other then that its identical, =^_^=