Plug and Play? Yeah, right!
“I recently purchased a professional sound card for my PC to replace the stock card for the professional audio work I need to do. My internal CD ROM drive has a cable that connected it to the old sound card. I’ve been told this is for the playback of audio CD’s. I can’t find anyplace to attach this cable to the new card. What do I do with the wire and how I am going to play back audio CD’s through my new sound card?”
Most “pro” sound cards do not have a connection for the audio from your CD ROM drive. Presumably this is because the manufacturers are trying to discourage users from using the card for generic Windows functions when it should be dedicated to the pro audio task at hand. You can just let the wire hang off the CD drive and not connect it. This will not cause any problems, but you will not be able to use it as an audio CD player. If you really need your CD ROM drive to play back audio through your computer you have a couple of choices:
- Leave your generic sound card installed and find a way to get your pro card to coexist with it. A few years ago this was a real challenge, but on most of the newer systems this isn’t that hard to do. It may require a call or two to technical support, but you should be able to do it.
- Putting aside the semantics of what makes a card “pro” there are some cards that are widely used for professional work that can accommodate the special CD hookup. Two that we sell are the EMU Audio Production Studio and the MIDIman DIO 2448. This is the better solution for maximum stability and if you really need all audio coming out of one card.
On the Macintosh side of things the problem is different. Macs all have sound built in, so there is no “sound card” per se. When you install a professional audio card in a Mac it is very unlikely you will ever encounter any conflicts with the built in sound. However, if you do want the audio from the CD to come out of your audio hardware instead of the Macintosh there is often no direct way to do it. Sure you can route this cable to that connector and maybe make it happen, but that’s kind of a kludge. The proper way to do it is with drivers that make your pro sound card show up in the Mac Sound Control Panel as an audio device for Mac sounds. This can be a great solution when the manufacturer of the sound card provides said drivers, but many of them never get around to it. Further, some configurations do not allow the Mac OS and your audio software program to access the sound hardware at the same time. In those situations you will have to open your Sound Control Panel and switch back and forth to determine how the audio hardware is allocated. If this sounds a bit confusing, don’t worry. Our Tech Support guys can help show you the way.