What's your recording setup?

For some free and easy to use audio software, try Audacity or Kristal

Matt

 

I use an Aardvark Q10, which consists of a PCI card and breakout interface with 8 discrete preamps. Aardvark is out of business now, but there are some similar things on the market.

Nice thing about the Q10 is that channels 7 and 8 have preamp settings designed for electric guitars and basses, so I can run direct with a DI box. If you don't have something like that, you should definitely use a DI box.

The Firewire and USB interfaces should work okay; they may not have the throughput of a PCI device, but it sounds like you don't need a whole lot of that.

 

i have a delta44 soundcard on a fairly beefy athlon 64 machine. its really nice, especially for individual or small group recordings. I normally only use 1 or 2 tracks at a time by myself, but having 4 available to jam with a couple people is nice. PCI should be your preferred interface type, with firewire a close second. M-audio makes nice stuff for either.

 

In real world terms Firewire can sometimes exceed PCI bandwidth depending on how many devices are on the PCI bus.

What kind of system do you have? Any suggestions we can give you are useless unless we know what you have to work with.

As for my setup I'm now on my 3rd home studio, second computer based one. Its a Powerbook G4 running Digital Performer 4.6, a MOTU 828MkII interface and a few plug ins external goodies.

 

The PreSonus gear is getting very good reviews and the price is right. I suggest making your decision based on the number and type of inputs and outputs you expect to need. The MOTU 828 MKII is a very good interface, but you can get something nice for less if you can live with less I/O.

 

Your first step should be an interface (tons of options, search this forum thoroughly), real recording software (Either Cakewalk or Cubase, both are excellent, I recomend starting on the mid level version of both because you simply do not need the capability that the top teir packages offer) and RAM (get at least 1 gig, preferably all your computer can hold).

If it were me I'd get an MAudio Firewire 410, a copy of Cakewalk Home Studio, and RAM.

 

+1, love my Delta 44.

 

Acid is for making loops and stringing loops into songs. Its not a multitrack recording package and can't do most of the things you would want to do in terms of editing/mixing songs. Read up on what you can do with programs like Cakewalk and you will be impressed if your only expirience is with ACID. Cakewalk in particular should appeal to you because it has fairly extensive support for ACID loops built in, so you could easily crate a drum track made of ACID loops right in cakewalk and then record your guitars bass and vocals on top, then do mix down,effects and CD burning right from one program.

For the DI, thats an XLR jack right? I don't know of any PC interfaces that have XLR inputs. Maybe someone else can toss out a suggestion, otherwise you will need to factor a cheap mixer into your budget.

 

Presonus and Echo both make fine, (relatively) inexpensive interfaces with XLR inputs, in addition to balanced 1/4".


Presonus just released the Inspire 1394 (they can't call it Firewire legally) with 4 channels, 2 XLR ins and 2 unbalanced 1/4" high-z (read: plug your axe straight in) inputs. It's listing for about $200, I think. The best part? You can daisy chain up to four of them for more channels and inputs, just buy another one if you need more ins. Shoot, I'm thinking of picking one up, and I don't even need it really. Might be worth looking at. Oh yeah, it comes with Cubase LE, ACID XMC, 3 gigs of drum samples, and a ton of other goodies, too.

 

Wow. That sounds like a very nice package. If I didn't already have an 828mkII I'd be interested.

 

I'm not so quick to get down on Acid as a DAW. While loops are it's main strength, you can record directly into tracks, apply plugins, and you have a decent mixing section. I used ACID and VEGAS a lot when they were still Sonic Foundry products. The sale to Sony happened to coincide with my switch to Apple, so it wasn't an issue. But I did a fair amount of multitrack work with them.

If you were looking to do demo stuff and work out songs, you could do a lot worse than Acid. Apple's GarageBand owes a lot to Acid, and there is some very good work being done in GB.

 

I looked at ACID quite some time ago and was unable to get anything remotely like multi track digital audio out of it, the version I tried couldn't even record single instances of audio longer than 30s, which pretty well eliminated the possibility of doing serious recording in it. It sounds like its changed a lot since then, so maybe it will work in this case.

Garage Band actually uses a lot of code from Logic since Apple bought EMagic, especially the softsynths and effects. I'd not heard that they based any of it on Acid, but that's certianly possible.

 

I'm running a Soundcraft Compact 10 mixer into 1) 3 Ghz P4 w/1 Gig RAM & Delta 1010 LT and 2) 600 mhz Celeron w/ 256 K RAM and Delta Audiophile 24/96. I'm using the P4 machine for multitrack recording/sequencing, planning on using the Celeron machine for digitizing my record and tape collection. I also have a Tascam 424 MK III cassette 4-track that still gets quite a bit of use.

I'm trying to do most of my recording in Linux--I've had good luck with the Planet CCRMA and Agnula DeMuDi software distributions. I picked the Delta cards because of their good reputation and their support under Linux. On the Window$ side I have Tracktion, the free versions of Live and Reason that came with the Delta cards, Kristal, and Native Instruments' Intakt sampler. I'm on the lookout for some more good freeware. I'm also waiting to see if prices on PowerPC Macs are gonna plummet when Apple switches to Intel chips.

I only got the Compact 10 about a week ago, but it's really tying the whole setup together. It has 2 built in DIs, 2 phono preamps, and two separate headphone mixes that allow for zero-latency monitoring, plus it lets me record to/monitor from both computers without repatching.

 

This is my current rig, it has seen some changes recently:

Presonus Firebox
Sonar 5 PE
Ableton Live 5
Sony Sound Forge 8
Izotope Ozone
Studio Projects B1 mic
Bass Pod XT Live

And some various soft-synths, mixer, monitors, utilities, etc. It takes a lot of work to sort all this out, work through crashes, and all the other normal computer headaches, but when it does work it screams.