Dell Vostro 1500 Sigmatel Soundcard and Stereo Mix

I’ve been very happy with my laptop, I even swear that it feels lighter , but recently I have wanted to record from the current output, e.g wave, stereo mix, or whatever you want to call it. Turns out I don’t have one by default. Dell’s drivers offered for my laptop do not support this “stereo mix” option, or so I thought.

First check if you have the stereo mix interface, right click on the volume icon in the tray, then click recording devices, then right click in the main box and tick both “Show Disabled Devices” and “Show Disconnected Devices”, if you are using the normal Dell drivers (dated September 2007 I think) for Vista, then you will need to do the following anyway (always good to check first though). Sigmatel do not offer drivers for their devices so you need to get them from Dell. Further digging around on Google searches led me to find that Dell have just released a Sigmatel driver (December 2007) for their laptops. Driver support page and direct link. Problem (for me with Vista) is that it’s XP only, not helpful, but the good news is that you just run the driver setup in “Windows XP sp2 compatibility mode”. This is done by right clicking on the setup file and going to properties, then the compatibility tab, tick the box to run in a compatibility mode. This works brilliantly, I now have the stereo mix option. Now, because of the way Vista is, you can only have one recording interface set to default, and you need it set to default in order to work.

The drivers for notebooks tend to be heavily modded by the laptop manufacturers, some remove all but the basic features, while others provide only a few. There are some hacked drivers available, but try official drivers first.

A little development, more a rant, but worth checking if you read this page.

There is now a forum thread to ask for help with your issues.