Adding "Stereo Mixer" to Windows 7 with Conexant sound card

This procedure worked for my laptop (Thinkpad E530) with a Conexant 20671 sound card, but I suspect it will work for other sound cards in the Conexant family.

I was playing with CamStudio to do a video capture of a Flash-based cartoon so that I can put it on the WDTV media player and play it on the big screen in the living room for my kids. The video capture worked brilliantly, but to do a sound capture, I needed to do some hacking.

Apparently, there was this recording device called "Stereo Mixer" that was pretty standard in the Windows XP days. This allowed you to capture whatever was played to the speaker in all its digital glory. Then under pressure from various organizations on the dark side of the force, Microsoft and soundcard makers starting disabling this wonderful feature from Windows Vista onwards.

So after much Googling around, I found out that for most sound cards, the hardware feature is still there, just not enabled on the software side. Unfortunately, to enable the "Stereo Mixer" feature is not as simple as ticking a checkbox. The procedure is frequently complicated and is different for various soundcard chipset families.

Luckily, for the Conexant sound card on my laptop, the procedure to enable the stereo mixer feature was comparatively straightforward.

First, right-click on the "Sound" icon in the system tray and select "Recording devices":

 

Then right-click on the whitespace and select "Show Disabled Devices":

Make sure you don't see a "Stereo Mix" device that was previously hidden.

Now, you need to add some entries to the registry. Create a ".reg" file with a text editor with the following content:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000\Settings\EPattributes\EpSettings\StereoMixEnable]
"Enable"=hex:01
"MixAssocSeq"=hex:e0,e0
"MuteGainSettings"=hex:00,00

Double-click on the .reg file and enter it into the registry. Verify by firing up "regedit".

This enters the "StereoMixEnable" values under "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet". You also need to enter this into all "ControlSet00x" subtrees under "HKLM\System". So for example, since I have "ControlSet001" and "ControlSet002" under "HKLM\System" on my machine, I edit the .reg file to:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000\Settings\EPattributes\EpSettings\StereoMixEnable]
"Enable"=hex:01
"MixAssocSeq"=hex:e0,e0
"MuteGainSettings"=hex:00,00

and double-click to enter it into the registry. I repeat for "ControlSet002".

Now reboot the machine. Then follow the previous steps to bring up the recording devices. If all goes well, you should now see a new, disabled "Stereo Mix" device in the list.

Right-click on the device and select "Enable":

Then set it to the default device by highlighting it, and selecting "Set Default".

Now, under CamStudio, I select "Options, Record audio from microphone". Since the default recording device is now "Stereo Mix", anything that is played through the speaker is now piped through to CamStudio for recording.

Mission accomplished!

Read More

Using Google Dashboard to manage your Android device backup

I used to use AppBrain/Fast Web Install to keep track of which apps I have installed on my phone, and to make it easier to reinstall those apps when the phone gets wiped or replaced. But AppBrain had been going down the tubes, and Fast Web Install had always been a hit-and-miss affair.

Android's own "backup to the cloud" system had previously been even more unusable. There isn't a place where you can see what has been backed up. And when you setup a new phone with your Google account, you just have to wait and pray that your favorite apps will be restored to the phone. Typically all the stars have to be aligned just right for this to happen. More often than not, after waiting for an hour or so and nothing happens, you just curse under your breath and proceed to install your favorites apps manually via the Play Store.

But I just looked again recently and was pleasantly surprised that things are much more civilized now. Firstly there is a place now where you can look at all the apps that are backed up. It's called the Google Dashboard. This is where you can find out almost all the information Google stores on your behalf across its wide range of services, including Contacts, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Google+ etc.

If this is the first time you are visiting Google Dashboard, you will be shocked how much Google knows about you. If you are not (and you own an Android smartphone with location history turned on), then you should definitely take a look at "Google Location History" (under "Latitude"). Even my wife doesn't know that much about me!

Anyway, under "Play Store", you should see an "Installed Applications" link.

Click on that link and you will be brought to a page that shows 1) the apps currently installed on your devices 2) all the apps you have ever installed on your devices

You can quite comfortably manage your entire app library from the web browser, including install/update/delete apps. The only thing missing is probably batch install, which I hope will be added later. But if you choose multiple apps for installation, the system is smart enough to install the apps sequentially so as not to max out the device CPU and storage I/O.

Note that this only tackles app backup. App settings will only be backed up if the app explicitly built it into its code. You can check which apps backup their settings to Google's cloud by looking under "Android devices, More data stored about this device".

Not sure why this information is provided on a separate page. It would have been more intuitive if this was integrated into the "Play Store" page IMHO.

Nevertheless, this is a major improvement compared to what we had previously. All the details about the backup on each device are displayed, and managing apps from the page works very robustly from my testing (compared to Fast Web Install). All we need now is batch install function. Google, are you listening?

Read More