There is yet another development available for TuneLab users - a calibration program that uses the precise time-of-day signals from the phone company to calibrate the sound card pitch reference. It has always been necessary to calibrate TuneLab when it is installed on a new computer. That is because the quartz frequency in the sound card can be a little too far off from its nominal value. Up till now the only way to calibrate TuneLab was to compare it to another accurate pitch reference. But what if you don't have access to any precise pitch references? Now you can use precise _time_ instead. The CalSound program is a calibration program that only needs to be run once on any one computer. As long as the sound card hardware is not changed, the calibration will remain valid. To run CalSound, you synchronize the CalSound timer to the phone company's time announcement, then leave your computer alone for about eight hours, then re-synchronize the clock. CalSound calculates the calibration by seeing how much adjustment was necessary in the timer after eight hours of drift. From this measurement, CalSound is able to precisely calculate the quartz frequency of the sound card, and thus provide TuneLab with the calibration data that it needs to be absolutely precise in pitch. Anyone who wants to try CalSound can download it from my web site at http://www.wwnet.net/~rscott Robert Scott Detroit-Windsor Chapter, PTG
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