On Friday 27 May 2005 12:19 pm, Steve Fosdick wrote:

I'd like to use the PC as a phone, i.e. transmit sound from the mic-in on the soundcard to the phone line, have the sound received from the phone line available for mixing in the sound card's headphone out and be able to dial from software. All this, of course, under Linux.

Sorry I have to ask why ? Why not just use Skype (or perhaps a more Open VoIP system) to make and receive calls (Skype even supports incoming and outgoing calls to/from a regular phone now)...Perhaps you don't have a broadband connection ?

Does anyone know what hardware I should look for for this. I am assuming some kind of modem or modem card but these seem a bit of a minefield. Does the little link cable that runs from a PCI modem card to the sound card do everything I need or do I need to be able to copy data digitally? How can I tell which modem chipsets have enough support to be able to do what I want?

No if you have the audio link through to the Modem then that should be enough,I am not sure quite how the software thing will work, Presumably it can all be done with a few AT commands to get the modem to dial but not try and handshake in the same way that the old dialler app on Windows did. I have not seen or heard of any application similar to the dialler app on Windows that do what you want, and even if it did I fear that the audio quality will be behind that of a decent desk phone unless you invest some money in a decent headset.

In my experience the mic in on modern soundcards is pretty useles, so you would be looking towards a USB headset, but then you are going to have to mess about with your mixer on the system to link the output of the headset to the input of the modem cards audio device and vice versa.

Also I think that maybe most of the software winmodem cards (that seem to be pretty much the only sort you can buy these days) won't have the audio passthrough facilities you will need.

There are still some old school voice/fax/data serial modems on the market that would do what you want, but naturally the software that comes with them is Windows specific and if anybody else here remembers "Supervoice" often quite nasty.

Googling shows that some mad people have actually managed to get supervoice running under wine....but I wouldn't suggest that as a serious solution.