All notebooks and most modern PCs rely on integrated audio. Listed on spec sheets and sales floors, the term simply means your PC’s sound circuitry lives tucked away inside one of the motherboard’s chips. Reducing the sound card’s circuitry to a single chip lowers the PC’s price, yet still lets your PC play stereo sound and record from a microphone or other gadget.

A few years ago, the term “integrated audio” cried out “budget PC,” leading to derisive scowls at geek gatherings. Integrated sound’s come a long way since then, and some of today’s new motherboards even include 5.1 surround sound for the most realistic rumbling helicopter explosions.

In a few years, integrated audio will handle all of a PC’s sounds, replacing everything but specialized cards aimed at musicians.

Gamers and music fans tend to drool over high-performance sound cards, which drop into a special slot (Section 1.7.1) on your motherboard. A basic stereo card runs less than $20; a more elaborate one with higher-quality sound costs between $150 and $200.

People upgrade to a sound card, shown in Figure 7-2, for several reasons.

Figure 7-2. Considered a high-end card, Creative Lab’s Audigy 2 ZS slips inside your PC, granting it 7.1 sound. It powers a wall of three speakers in front, two in back, and one on each side. (Toss in the bass-producing subwoofer for the “.1” part.)

Some sound circuitry doesn’t live inside the PC at all. Instead, it resides in a separate box, as shown in Figure 7-3, that plugs into your computer’s USB port. These boxes cost about the same as a sound card and come in handy for people who want better sound but shudder at the thought of opening up their PC’s case. For instance, if your current sound card won’t play your DVDs in surround sound, plug a box into a USB port, plug the speakers into the box, and listen to the helicopters whirl overhead.

When shopping for a plug-in box, make sure it plugs into a FireWire or USB 2.0 port rather than the older USB 1.1 ports. The USB 2.0 ports move information 10 times faster than the older versions, which is vital when moving lots of sound information between the box and your PC.

Microphones offer a way for you to not only talk back to your PC, but have it record you as well. Few PCs come with a bundled microphone, but nearly all PCs—including laptops—include a spot where you can plug one in. Many people happily ignore this function; others find microphones indispensable, using them in a wide variety of programs:

Very few people record anything but their own speaking voice on a PC, so the voice-recording circuitry rarely sounds better than a telephone. Feel free to buy a fairly cheap PC microphone, like the $10 model shown in the top of Figure 7-4.

Many microphones bypass the microphone port altogether and plug into the ever-versatile USB port. People who use their microphones for communication rather than dictation sometimes prefer headset microphones with attached earphones (see Figure 7-4, bottom). Since the other person’s voice comes over the headphones, rather than out through your PC’s speakers, these headsets cut down on feedback.

Figure 7-4. Top: PCs don’t record in stereo sound, so save your money and buy an inexpensive mono microphone. To meet different needs, some microphones come mounted on a stand for your desktop; others attach to your monitor (or come built into the monitor). A few even attach to your collar with a clip. Bottom: Combination microphone headsets, handy for talking to others during instant messaging and other conferencing programs, plug into a computer’s USB port or come with two cables, one for the microphone port and the other for the speaker port. They’re popular for folks working in offices and construction sites since they filter out outside noise.

Almost every PC offers the same type of headphone jack as your iPod—they both dish up stereo sound and neither jack’s powerful enough, by itself, to drive its sound out to a pair of speakers. To compensate, speaker manufacturers build power into the speakers that they make for PCs (that’s why they’re often called powered speakers). Some speakers also contain tiny battery-powered amplifiers, creating a battery gobbler with tinny sound. The better ones plug straight into the wall, just like a home stereo.

Some cheap speakers bypass the PC’s headphone jack and plug straight into the PC’s USB port, drawing power straight from the USB port. That leaves them more susceptible to electrical interference, unfortunately, a phrase that, loosely translated, means a constant background whine.

A big step up in quality and price gets you a large subwoofer—a box-like heavy speaker that dishes out desk-shaking bass tones. The subwoofer plugs into a wall outlet to power its built-in amplifier, which routes the sound to satellite speakers—smaller speakers you strategically place around you. Most subwoofers come with both analog and digital ports to connect with whatever signal your PC’s sound card dishes out.

A single pair of speakers works fine for most people’s needs, and all sound cards support them. Game players and movie watchers often invest in more expensive sound adapter and speaker combinations, placing different speakers around the room for "surround sound,” where the music emanates from all edges of the room.

To make Windows XP start using your current speaker setup, choose Start → Control Panel → Sounds and Audio Devices, and choose Advanced in the Speaker’s Settings area. Windows XP lets you select your current speaker setup from a dropdown box, shown in Figure 7-5.

Figure 7-5. Windows XP handles a wide variety of speaker settings, from those built into a laptop to those resembling a home theater. As you switch between settings, Windows XP displays a handy picture showing where to position each speaker. Some sound cards come with their own speaker selection programs that work much like the one shown here in Windows XP. If you select a speaker setup in your sound card’s bundled program, avoid potential problems by making sure that the program automatically updated Windows XP’s settings to match.

Most people choose one of these common speaker configurations:

It looks pretty cool when you have eight speakers surrounding your PC, but unless a sound technician designed your room, you probably won’t notice much difference between 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 sound.

Your PC includes a built-in synthesizer, but you needn’t join a 70s revival band to make use of it. Nearly every computer game creates its soundtrack by using the synthesizer. The more expensive the sound card, the more realistic the synthesized sounds are. Also, some annoying Web sites greet you with a burst of sound that leaves you reaching for your speaker’s volume knob; credit your PC’s synthesizer for that, as well.

To give your PC’s built-in synthesizer a listen, fire up Windows XP’s Search program, find a file called onestop.mid on your C drive, and give it a double-click. Slipped into Windows XP as a test file for programmers, the song plays a wide range of instruments through your PC’s synthesizer.

Called Audio In, Aux In, or Line In, this port lets you record stereo sound from a wide variety of electronic gadgets, including TVs, camcorders, and radios. Most ports on your PC stay constantly connected to a particular device—either speakers or a microphone, for instance. Items that you plug into this port, by contrast, change according to what you want to record at any given time.

Today, many people connect their record players to this port to convert their records to CDs, a chore described next.

Many music fans still cling to their old record collections. Some can’t find CDs to replace their cherished Herb Alpert LPs. Others loathe paying twice for the same recordings. Fortunately, pretty much any PC nowadays lets you convert your old records into a variety of digital formats. You can hire a professional for the job, or do it yourself with your own sound card and CD burner. Both have their advantages.

If you choose the do-it-yourself route, follow these steps:

You may not have heard of this format, but you’ve certainly heard the music. Musicians record their songs as immense WAV files, which do a yeoman’s work by preserving the full quality of the original music. The music then moves straight to CD without any compression, letting songs retain their full quality.

When displaying a CD’s contents in My Computer and similar programs, Windows XP does something confusing. Instead of showing the CD’s WAV files and pleasantly offering to convert them into the more versatile MP3 files, Windows simply lists the uncompressed songs as shortcuts called CDA files: Track01.cda, Track02.cda, Track03.cda, and so on.

Unless you’re a musician recording with a home studio, you probably won’t be messing with WAV files. They’re much too big for most portable players, anyway. To pack as much music on a portable player as possible, people turn to the compressed file formats, discussed next.

Thankfully shortened to the acronym MP3, this sound format began life in the early 90s, survived the wrath of the recording industry and lives on as the world’s most popular music format. MP3 squishes a song’s size by nearly 90 percent (compared to the original WAV file), letting you cram hundreds of songs onto your PC, iPod, or other portable music player. Best of all, MP3 files work on nearly every portable music player sold.

Windows Media Player plays MP3 files without a problem. But creating MP3 files in Media Player 9, the version included with Windows XP, costs money. Patent-holder Fraunhofer (http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/) charges licensing fees of around $10 per computer for its MP3 codec—a small file holding the formula for stuffing music into an MP3 file. That leaves you two options for creating MP3 files:

Some people simply bypass Windows Media Player altogether: The LAME (Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder) MP3 codec works with several competing programs to create MP3-compatible files for free. Download and install the LAME MP3 codec (http://lame.sourceforge.net/), along with any of the recommended free MP3 encoding programs listed on the site.

Instead of supporting MP3, Microsoft offers its competing WMA format for storing files. Windows Media Player plays and creates WMA files. Many newer music players (but not the iPod) also support WMA as well as MP3.

Finding a WMA-compatible player has grown so complicated that Microsoft created PlaysForSure (http://www.playsforsure.com ), a sales and marketing site disguised as a service for matching compatible players with download services and music formats. (A search for iPod on the site brings up only a competing player that handles WMA files; iTunes isn’t even mentioned.)

Windows Media Player adds copy protection to every WMA file you create, stopping you (or anyone) from playing back that file on another computer—even on other computers you own. To disable the copy protection in Media Player, choose Tools → Options and turn off the “Copy protect music” checkbox.

AAC became Apple’s soldier in the music format wars when Apple chose it as the format for the iPod, Apple’s wildly successful digital music player. Although a large group of companies—including Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia—created AAC, few competing music players play it, making it impractical for all but the legions of iPod faithful (more than 10 million at last count).

The iPod also plays MP3 files; to help sway PC customers with huge libraries of WMA files, iTunes for Windows converts non-copy-protected WMA files to AAC.

Apple’s iTunes software sells only songs in the AAC format, and it adds copy protection to keep the file from moving to more than five PCs.

Converting a music file from one format to another—a chore you encounter when moving music to a digital music player—usually takes a few clicks on a converter program like dBpower MC (http://www.dbpoweramp.com). Converting MIDI files isn’t nearly as easy, as the files don’t contain recorded music, but instructions for how a synthesizer should play back a piece of music. Depending on the synthesizer, a MIDI file can sound as cheesy as a children’s toy or as beautiful as a harp in the park.

If you need to convert a MIDI file to MP3 for a ring tone, for instance, fire up Apple’s free iTunes program (http://www.apple.com). It converts MIDI to MP3 by playing it through your PC’s synthesizer, and then records the results as it plays. Consequently, the resulting MP3 file sounds only as good as the sound card on the computer you use to convert it.

As for converting MP3 files to MIDI, forget it. Some programs offer a conversion feature, but the resulting file sounds pretty awful.

The computerized version of an old player piano roll, a MIDI program faithfully writes down every note a musician plays during a performance, as well as each note’s duration and intensity. Play back the MIDI file on a synthesizer, and you hear the original performance. But MIDI’s much more powerful than a mere recording device.

For instance, piano rolls only sound like, well, antique pianos, but synthesizers mimic any instrument. That lets a MIDI keyboard player frighten the neighbors with tuba or accordion solos. Layer more parts into the mix, toss in a string section, and you’ve created an entire orchestra. (Most thunderous orchestral scores you hear in the movie theater started with a single musician in front of a MIDI keyboard.)

Most people hear only MIDI sounds on their PCs during computer games, but if you’re a musician, MIDI gives you a universal musical language for a wide range of tasks.

For an ironic twist on history, drop by the Roll Scanning (http://www.trachtman.org/rollscans) Web site to hear old piano rolls scanned in and saved as MIDI files. If you find any old piano rolls in your attic, send them to Mr. Trachtman for scanning and conversion, helping to preserve our nation’s musical history.

By far the biggest problem with PC sound comes from pushing the right plug into the wrong port of the sound card. It’s certainly easy to do, as most sound cards present a row of three or more identically shaped jacks, as shown in Figure 7-8. Confounding the problem further is their dark location in the back of your PC. Grab a flashlight, take a close look at the ports, and make sure you plugged your device into the correct jack. Figure 1-21 (Section 1.8.7) and the table below it show the identifying symbols etched next to each jack.

It’s usually hard to tell which cable belongs to which speaker. After tracing a cable to its destination, make note of it. Wrap a piece of tape around the cable near the plug and write down what’s on the other end of the cable: the front, rear, or middle pair of speakers; the microphone; or perhaps a camcorder or VCR.

Pushing a plug into the wrong port won’t do any damage; it just won’t work. If you’re desperate, try the process of elimination: plug the thing into every port until you eventually hear your music.

Figure 7-8. When plugging in a jack, look at the little symbol etched next to each jack—specifically, the little arrow on the symbol. If it points inward, the jack accepts sound, which means it’s for a microphone or other sound-producing item. If the arrow points outward, it’s a speaker jack. Some manufacturers put identifying colors next to each port on some newer cards; for example, Microphone = pink, Line In = blue, Speaker = green, and Digital = orange.

Your PC contains nearly a dozen things that can make noise, including its synthesizer, CD player, and microphone. Since your PC can play all of them at the same time, which should play the loudest? Windows XP’s built-in mixer, shown in Figure 7-9, answers that question. The mixer provides a scaled-down version of the multitrack console found in every recording studio.

Figure 7-9. The mixer lists everything in your PC that’s capable of making sounds—a list that grows so large on some sound cards that half the mixer hangs outside your monitor’s view. To trim it, remove some of the devices you don’t use—the Telephone Answering Device, for instance, or the Line In and AUX ports. Choose Options → Properties, and then turn off the checkboxes next to devices you don’t use. The mixer removes them from view, shrinking its size accordingly.

To call up the mixer, choose Start → Control Panel → Sounds and Audio Devices and choose Advanced in the Device Volume area. Windows XP’s mixer appears onscreen, showing you the current volume level of everything inside your PC that makes noise.

To control the volume of each item in your PC, slide the mixer’s controls, shown in Figure 7-9. Slide them up to increase the volume and down to reduce the volume.

Check these settings when you’re having trouble hearing or recording something:

Your PC lets you change its volume levels through its mixer, described above. But you can change the mother of all volume controls, its Master volume, in three additional ways.

You need to inspect all three of these volume settings because if only one’s turned down, you won’t hear anything.

Once you rule out the main sound problem culprits—the mixer, the mute toggle, and the cable ports—the next step is to check your sound card’s drivers. They probably need to be updated or reinstalled (a process described on Section 16.5.4).

Before upgrading to a new driver, be sure to uninstall any software installed by your old adapter: choose Start → Control Panel → Add or Remove Programs to make Windows XP uninstall the unwanted goods.