Totally Doodgical

I was trying to record an internet radio show (that my friend appeared on) today and discovered that Dell had nicely “removed” the feature to record what was going through my speakers.  After some searching and driver install hacking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did:

1.  Download the latest drivers from Dell
2. Run the EXE, but once it gets to the license screen I cancelled (but you do want it to unzip to a folder)
3. Go into the folder and into the i386 folder (for you intel users)
4. Go into the vista folder
5. back up the ADIHdAud.inf file
6. open up the ADIHdAud.inf file and make the following edits:
7. change:  HKR,AD1983\\Disable, OutR, 1, 01
8. to:   HKR,AD1983\\Disable, OutR, 1, 00
9. change:  HKR,AD1983\\Disable, MonR, 1, 01
10. to:  HKR,AD1983\\Disable, MonR, 1, 00
11. change:  HKR,AD1984\\Disable, MonR, 1, 01
12. to:  HKR,AD1984\\Disable, MonR, 1, 00
13. By changing these values you will now have a fresh install that includes the stereo mix feature (I believe the 1->0 change told it to no longer disable the feature)
14. Save the file
15. Go to your device manager in your control panel
16. Go to sound, video and game controllers and select soundmax
17. hit the delete key on your keyboard
18. tell it to delete the drivers (check the box)
19. reboot
20. go to the directory where you dumped the drivers from the exe (the main directory that was above the ADIHdAud.inf  file)
21. run the setup program
22. now go to the control panel and select sound
23. right click in a blank area in the box and select the “show disabled devices” option
24. click on the recording tab
25. right click on the stereo mix icon (faded icon) and select enable
26. download audacity (free) - you may want the LAME encoder as well, if you prefer MP3 audio
27. install audacity and run it
28. select edit -> preferences -> audio i/o tab -> recording box -> device drop down box -> stereo mix
29. hit OK
30. hit the big red circle button to record (although I suggest that you have the stream running first)

Phew!  I just hate when companies break fully functional hardware.  In any case I hope this helped you as it did me. 

Here’s the references that I used:

 Helm of Disintegration

Gec Living

Although I am not a mac owner, my uncle is and he just got an iPod classic for his son.  As it turns out, if you have Mac OS 10.3.9 and an iPod classic, iTunes refuses to sync to the new iPod and gives an error requiring an upgrade to 10.4 or later.  The Mac boards are some help, but it took piecing together a few things to get the iPod Classic to work with 10.3.9.  Here’s our outline:

1. Have someone format your iPod through iTunes (we went to the SLC apple store)
2. Find out your fwid (the SLC apple store was helpful there as well)
3. get yamipod and install
4. plug in ipod
5. tell yamipod that you have a ipod classic
6. tell yamipod the fwid
7. add songs!

If you don’t have an apple store nearby, I’m not sure what to tell you.  Google shows that getting the fwid might be difficult.  You also need to have a friend with 10.4 to initialize the iPod.

I can only think of a couple of reasons for the restriction for 10.4.  None of them make much sense.  Apple wants people to upgrade their OS; Apple worries about the user experience of people taking days to sync their library over USB 1.X and won’t allow it; Apple programmers use a function available only in 10.4 and apple is too lazy to add it to 10.3.  With my uncle’s iPod classic playing music and syncing to yamipod running in Mac OS 10.3.9, the restriction is obviously not a hardware problem, but a software restriction put in by apple.  Not cool.

Edit: 1/8/2008:

yamipod has a faq on how to find the fwid.