CompuServe Messages

Hi Michael, OK let's see if we can get the hardware aspect of this dilemma out of the way. I do believe if I remember right that the Mammals disk has both Yellow and Red Book audio. Red book audio is nothing more than digitally recorded audio that has been converted back to analog _onboard_ the CDROM drive and passed to either the headphone jacks and/or the RCA phono jacks on the back of the CDROM. If Red book audio is plugged into the LINE input on the SB Pro, it's just like plugging an input from an audio CD player into the LINE input of a stereo amplifier. The SB Pro acts as nothing more than an amplifier passing the amplified audio onto the external speakers. Yellow book audio OTOH is the digital representation of audio in a message packet kind of way. It's sort of like MIDI, there are just commands to a sound device to reproduce the required sound via the DAC's (Digital to Analog Converters). In the case of the CDROM the signals for the audio pass over the SCSI cable to the CDROM interface card as digital signals. I must say here, I cannot remember if you have a Sony CDROM with its proprietary interface or an industry standard SCSI interface. Once the Yellow book audio signals are decoded by the SB Pro, they are passed out of the OUTPUT jacks as normal amplified analog audio on to your external speakers. So the only difference between RED and YELLOW book audio is where the digital to analog conversion takes place. Anyway, sorry for the long dissertation, back to the question: >Do I have to run a Soundblaster program BEFORE the Mammals program to enable >the Soundblaster card to pass the CDROM input signals through the card into >my external speakers (which are attached to the Soundblaster output line)? The only SoundBlaster program you need to run is the SB-SET program, usually as a statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. This sets the various input [>> Continued in next msg]