PC sound card as sig-gen, sa, & o-scope?

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Signal generation - under linux, the program "siggen". Free, and basic. Works for me.

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Thanks. Unfortunately I have an investment in Windows (and all the associated software) and won't in the near term be going to Linux.

I did some more searching and found a reasonably priced package:

It can create tones and waveshapes, and some are built in:

"The Expression Evaluator allows sound to be generated from almost any equation. For example, to generate a simple sine wave, the following can be entered:

sin(2*pi*f*t)

General expressions for sine, triangle, and square waves are already provided, plus expressions for dial tones, effects, and noises."

It looks to do most of the other things I care about too. The price is apparently around $45 US. That doesn't seem bad--even a starving EE student could almost afford that. I think I'm on my way to having a garage audio lab. LOL

I use DaqGen for generating signals in the audio range (the program can do up to 64KHz... but depends on limits of soundcard).

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There was something similar and in the same ballpark pricewise named Cool Edit 2000, it was a regular stereo wave editor with pretty much the features of Goldwave (and a better UI, IMHO), and there was Cool Edit Pro which was a multitrack recorder/editor for several hundred dollars. Adobe bought the Cool Edit products, dropped the lower-end 2000 product (too bad), and renamed the Pro product Adobe Audiotion and kept the several-hundred-dollar pricetag. If you can find earlier 'trial'/shareware versions of Goldwave or Cool Edit 96, maybe on a shareware download site, these are 99 percent fully functional and very useful as they are. If what you want is to do audio analysis, there's a free program named Rightmark that does lots frequency response and distortion tests, and can give precise measurements even with cheap soundcards (all consumer/game soundcards are less-than-great quality), since it tests the card and subtracts its contribution to the test results.

If you're using this for audio-band signals all this will work okay, but outside of the 20Hz to 20kHz band you'll need a 'real' A/D card that goes from DC to your upper frequency of interest, and these aren't so cheap. You might as well get a 'real' oscilloscope. I've got a Velleman digitizing two-channel scope, it goes to 60MHz, is powered by a wallwart, plugs into a parallel port, and cost about $300 a few years back. The Pentium computer and monitor it's plugged into cost a lot less than that at the thrift store.

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martin

Serious error. All shortcuts have disappeared. Screen. Mind. Both are blank.