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Dell Colludes With RIAA, Disables Stereo Mix
RCTrucker7 writes with a link to a Maximum PC story, which begins: "Details of Dell's surreptitious collusion with RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) have emerged. Apparently, the computer manufacturer disabled the Stereo Mix/Mono Mix/Wave Out sound recording function on certain notebooks to assuage RIAA. The hardware functionality is being disabled without any prior notice and one blogger has even alleged that he was asked by Dell's customer support staff to [shell] out $99 if he desired the stereo mix option. Gateway and Pac Bell are the other two manufacturers to have bowed to RIAA at the expense of their customers' satisfaction and disabled stereo mix without warning." (There are some workarounds posted in the comments of the linked article.)
Nope. If you trace back the trail of links, the link for appeasing the riaa goes to a forum post that only mentions the details of the registry workaround. This was already determined to be hearsay on days ago when the story broke. Congratulations to the /. editors for their diligence.
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
You have to turn your hardware acceleration off.
Right-click
Properties
Settings Tab
Advanced
Troubleshoot Tab
Drag slider to the left
Take you pictures and just slide it back to the right.
1 4/\/\ 1337
Indeed. Techdirt had an article about this two days ago.
From the techdirt link posted above:
However, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that the RIAA had any part in this. On the whole, it sounds like someone just made a bad decision in terms of how to configure certain sound cards. If someone can provide any evidence that the RIAA actually had a role in this, we'll post an update, but there's no reason to jump to conclusions without any evidence. That's what the RIAA does.
Yep, plenty of facts! Can't get more conclusive than that! RIAA is caught red-handed.
I guess FUD works both ways.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
What's also funny is that typically the Stereo Mix functionality is implemented post-DAC. So when you're recording from stereo mix, the signal goes:
Output->DAC->ADC->Stereo Mix
So modulo electrical noise on the microphone and headphone jack, you get essentially the same result you'd get as if you went:
Output->DAC->Headphone Jack-> $6.00 Cable->Line In Jack->ADC->Line In
... that I encountered this issue just yesterday for the first time on a new Dell laptop (with SigmaTel sound) when I needed to record from the stereo mix -- for lawful uses, mind you.
I did some googling of my own and found other users who located a Dell driver (R171789) for XP that can be installed in Vista using the XP-SP2 compatibility mode option. I found this driver, installed it as prescribed, went into Vista's Recording Devices, told it to show and enable all disabled devices, and boom, there was my stereo mix. So far I have been recording without any issues.
So yeah, without question it sucks that I even had to go through that, but it took me 10 minutes of research and even less than that to enable and configure.
I hope this helps somebody.