The problem with the way I do it is that if you, for whatever
reason, and I can think of several, want to change the sample rate, it
messes up all the timers that are built in to the program so you have
to get more fancy and make your program calibrate itself so that
delays come out the same as before and any buffers you built to deal
with any kind of timing situation are appropriately sized to hold the
same amount of sound.

        My program is probably not as spiffy as the Windows programs
out there.  The shareware program I have heard about produces wave
files at the 11.5KHZ sampling rate which is more of a standard rate
for low-bandwidth wave files.

        I am sorry I can't talk intelligently about all the
programming goodies in Windows.  I started shifting from DOS to Linux
instead of Windows about 4 or 5 years ago
because I am kind of cheap, for one thing, and my job is all UNIX all
the time.

        The longer I learn about UNIX, the more I realize I still need
to learn to be a true guru.

        One last comment about the time base issue.  In all
multi-tasking operating systems such as UNIX, Windows and DOS, fine
timing is almost impossible.  DOS is not generally considered a
multi-tasking OS, but it really is.  You just have to play with the
interrupts and hope to Heaven you got the exit vector right.  The
problem is that many other things are also using interrupts and the
interrupt controllers prioritize who gets to go first.  Sometimes,
your interrupt routine gets preempted by something more important like
the disk drives controller or keyboard.  Your interrupt routine may
still end up running, but it might be a few thousanths of a second
late this time around.

        That is totally unacceptable for sound so sound cards and that
little timer that lets your P.C. speaker beep and play single notes
are all hardware-based timers.  That is why the sampling rate for
sound can be used as a good time base in your program.  You just have
to be able to adjust everything else to whether the sample rate is 8
khz, 16 KHZ or maybe 44.1 KHZ which is the CD audio sampling rate.
There are several other rates, also like 32 KHZ.

Cheers,

Steve Forst writes:
>Martin,
>
>I'd tip my hat to you, but my bald head  would get cold.   What you wrote is
>way above me, but I'm still impressed.  I have 2 choices here in windows:
>Gold wave, and Scanner  Recorder. One of these should suit my needs.