Once apon a time Dave Hatch said, 'Re: Modem to soundblaster' to Simon Byrnand...

 SB> What a load of rubbish. Any voice modem worth its salt with speaker
 SB> and mic sockets on the back can do exactly that, so you've obviously
 SB> never tried. As the saying says - never let the person who says it
 SB> cant be done interrupt the person doing it :-)

 DH> OK - what manufacturer makes a "voice modem" - what's the model
 DH> number, and where's it on sale?
 DH> No modem that I've ever seen, in some considerable years of using some
 DH> tens of different models, has had such a facility.   This doesn't mean
 DH> that there couldn't be one - details please?

Sorry, I just assumed everybody who is into modeming knew what a "voice"
modem was. By voice I really mean voice/fax/data, but that stands to
reason. My modem is a Dynlalink 1414VE, and is a fairly middle of the
road 14.4K internal modem.

Quite simply the 'voice' facility lets the modem, with the right software
act as an answerphone. Well more than that, a complete voice mail system
in fact. To this end, the modem has hardware (all on the one chip of course
;-) which can record and play audio from the phone line to/from a file
on the hard drive. The digitised data is sent through either the COM port,
or as in the case of my modem, it can use a DMA channel for better quality
and performance.

So straight away it is able to digitise incomming speech and store it as
a file, realtime, even on my 386SX-25. The quality is not hi-fi, but its
at least "phone quality" ;) The catch with using it to record to a wave
file, (which is what the guy was after) is that voice software uses a
different format - .RIF, which has to be converted to .WAV, and you loose
a lot of quality doing that for some reason...
                                           
So my suggestion made use of another feature of nearly all voice/fax/data
modems - MIC and speaker sockets. The MIC socket is used as one means of
recording greeting messages, or in "speakerphone mode". The speaker
socket is used as one way of playing back recorded messages, but it is
also tied up with the modem speaker, and if you are on-line with the
modem speaker enabled, dialing for example, and you have a speaker plugged
into that socket, you hear crystal clear dialing and ringing through the
external speaker.

By going ATL1M1H1, it enables the speaker, and goes on-line, so the
conversation is now comming out the speaker socket. Plug that into the
MIC or line input of a SB16, and presto, record 16 bit quality wave
files of the conversation...Simple huh?

Regards,
Simon

... Stack overflow:  too many pancakes.  User halted.
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