Got a new USB sound interface, Creative Sound Blaster X-FI HD, using it for EE stuff though. It has issues (it made a software no longer be able to access sound) so I need to read the manual. Unfortunately it is in a stupid compressed HTML format or "CHM". Neither Firefox nor IE nor anything I tried reads it. Is there a trick in uncork it?
Creative is not helpful. No phone numbers, bad web site, email request went unanswered. So far for customer service ...
Thanks. I knew it was one of those proprietary pieces of junk but didn't know that one PDF reader might decipher it. So if all else fails I'll have to install Sumatra Reader just to read that one file. With some luck the file is "too new" and can't be deciphered.
It puzzles me how absent-minded some marketing departments can be these days.
You could probably have simply got on their site and DL'd it again, and not gone through all this. You would have been done four minutes after you flustered yourself, way back when you needed the info..
Ahem, recall what I said about Creative. ;-) Your best bet with Creative is to return the device and get something else. Your disk drive will thank you for the reduced bloat.
You probably have a file association error. I just click on CHM files and they open.
I had an old Creative Cardbus sound card from the old Win2k/XP days. I give Creative credit for attempting to write a new drive, but it sucked. The card doesn't work anymore on windows, so I don't feel obligated to keep screwing with it. The odd thing is it was fine under ALSA.
It's a standard old-school (Win 98 and later era) help file- I have hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. Default is to open with hh.exe.
formatting link
It should also open with IE, but maybe you've got a deliberately crippled (active-X) or corrupted system.
The main dislike I have for the stock CHM files is that the tiny and quite snappy viewer program does not allow you to resize the fonts, so unless you've got a super-nasty low-res monitor, everything is too small.
One solution is to use Chmfox with Firefox, which does not have that limitation. The price is right too ($0).
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Not clear if this is what you mean, but Vista and 7 deleted support for older windows help files. They replaced the help executable with a stub, as I recall. The fix is...
Add hlp to vista or windows 7 Copy files from xp put ftsrch.dll in /windows/system32 put winhlp32.exe in /windows have to take ownership and get access to delete the old file
didn't bother with other files. There's also a .wmu file to install it for real, but didn't want the hassle.
Now there's an idea. I won't ever try that in Thunderbird anymore though. Last time I tried Mnenhy and it thoroughly screwed up the whole installation. Some SW folks have a tendency to try to "improve" things they should have left alone.
I am tempted to send it back because it's iffy in the drivers and the company is lacking in support. But what else is there? I need something that's going to be around for a while and is low noise, linear, useful for measurements. I do not need it for any audio.
Of course you need it for audio, but perhaps not for sound.
Happy hunting:
USB is a bit limiting. There are USB to PCI converters, but not cheap.
By the time you box it up, it will probably cost as much as a good sound card.
I can tell you that PCI to PCI expansion boxes (like a Magma) are brain-dead easy to use. You power up the external box first, then boot the PC. Linux and windows works fine. No drivers needed for the box since both operationg systems have it in their kernels.
I have a Magma I got from a recording studio that runs 3 sound cards at the same time, with room for 4 more. If you ever took Bart to Milbrae, you go right past DigiDesign, which rebrands the Magma boxes.
I have no first hand experience with USB to PCI.
Incidentally, when you use an oversampled ADC, just how exactly does one say when the sample occurred? For a lot of applications that doesn't matter, but it always bugged me since it isn't as "clean" as a ADC with a S/H on the front end.
Then I'd also have to buy a power station with it :-)
Ok, but what is a really good sound card? Vladimir mentioned clock jumping on C-Media chips. If that is true I can't use them.
But this has to be a laptop and the box should be not too bulky. At least not
That's a 2-3h drive for me ...
There should be a proper lowpass filter up from, then it doesn't matter too much how the sample is derived. Most important is that the sample rate never dithers.
Why on earth don't some companies just provide a PDF? But it doesn't matter much anymore because this unit or maybe the driver had a lot more issues and I returned it.
Some of the best LTSpice tutorials if someone wants to learn the ropes come from universities. That's how I learned it. But I think it was from South America and not everything was in English. They wrote it for their classes, it kept growing, and then they piled the official LTSpice stuff in with it. Like a TexMex meal :-)
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