Home audio recording (to computer)

Hey guys! I’m wondering if anyone around the SDMB is really into home audio recording (i.e. to a computer, not a 4-track or something)… does anyone have any good tips or links? I may be coming into some money (i.e. getting a good job for a few months) and wouldn’t mind setting myself up a little.

Can anyone tell me about their home setup? Refer me to good websites? Talk shop about soundcards and software?

it really depends on what it is you want to record.
Live music is largley dependent on good microphones and mixers but if I was to recommend something for the casual musician I would suggest the live or audigy series from sound blaster.
I use a live 5.1 card to record guitar and vocals over drum tracks (midi) or karaoke tracks. The Live! card has quite a number of special effects and reverb/echoeing features that can be applied to individual inputs.
I tend to sing more than play guitar (i suck at guitar) and the karaoke settings are pretty nice…

I’ve managed to get some pretty decent results with a Soundblaster Live! card, a halfway decent mic, and Cakewalk Pro Audio.

The biggest limitations I found with the Soundblaster was latency - you can’t really listen to one track in headphones while laying down the second, and real time effects like reverb have some lag. I understand the new Audigy cards are better at this.

Get a decent mixer with some microphone preamps, and use good microphones.

Soundblaster is good for the consumer and pc games. For serious home recording enthusiasts, Soundblaster is considered complete and utter crap. Try Audigy or Audiophile for decent starter cards.

You might want to think about exactly what your recording needs are. Recording one track at a time only? Then a 2 In/2 out will be fine. Multiple tracks at once? Then you will need multiple ins. If you want to all the individual tracks through a mixer (as opposed to mix and burning in the pc), then you will want more outs. Obviously, the more options you need, the greater the cost. So do some research on the subject.

I recommend the following sites:

http://www.recordingproject.com/bbs/index.php
But the MOST important thing, apart from the recording device itself, is monitors. If you want cd quality recordings, consumer stereo speakers do not have a flat enough frequency response to allow you to hear the music objectively. Nearfield monitors are even more important than microphones: you won’t know how good the instrument sounds through the microphone if you aren’t hearing the sonic picture accurately. Tannoy Proto-J’s are great monitors. Yorkvilles too.

Microphones are also important. Industry standard is Shure for guitar recording. Another great brand for condensor mics (good for acoustic and vocals) is Marshall. Condensor mics need a preamp to up the signal. Art Tube Preamps are great for starters.

My setup consists of about $20k worth of equipment, which consist of Tannoy Proto-J monitors, an ADAT 20 bit recorder, a pc designated for recording, an RME Digi24/96 soundcard, a Studiomaster Diamond 16x2 mixer, 3 acoustic guitars, 2 electrics, one bass, and a drum machine.

That second paragraph is still about soundcards, btw.

Most soundcards dedicated to audio come bundled with recording software. But if you need software, the cheapest is N-Track and can be had at http://www.fasoft.com. Software has nothing to do with sound quality, so you can skimp on the cost if necessary.

It depends mostly on what you are trying to achieve. What was said above aobmut the soundblaster cards is spot on, they (and all until you get to pro/semi-pro cards) can have quite nasty latency under Windows. Mac hardware seems to eliminate this problem. Good quality mics are a must for voice recording as is a mixing desk. The software is not so important (again depending on what you are looking for) but I use Cubase for midi and some audio and Nuendo for vocal recording. Neither of these is cheap.

I have had NO latency problems at all with my soundcard (live 5.1) and it is quite capable of multi track recording.
I have no intention to make “studio quality” tracks, but I bet I could send you a song or two and you would not be able to tell that it was recorded at my desk. :slight_smile:

I would advocate a different approach. Even the best soundcards seem to shortchange the audio input circuitry. I’d recommend using audio components to do a good-quality recording first, to either a very good quality analog or directly to a digital medium. For one thing, I think the expected lifetime of audio components tends to be much longe than the typical PC setup, so money spent here is a better investment. Then copy to an audio CD/RW (if not already directly recorded to one) and carry the CD over to the PC to do your post-processing.

That is the approach I take, recording to ADAT first and using the pc for digital editing, backup, and cd burning.

However, when you are dealing with separate components for recording tracks, analog/digitial (A/D) conversion becomes a concern. If you record to, for example, an analog 8 track, you will still need a soundcard with quality A/D converters to preserve the quality of the tracks you recorded to tape, and this puts you in the more expensive range of audio soundcards, like the Echo cards.

If you are recording to a separate digital recorder, this becomes less of a concern, because typical recorders have a digital transfer process that goes through the s/pdif input or the usb inputs on the soundcard. My ADAT uses an optical cable called a lightpipe that transfers 8 tracks at a time to and from the pc.

So, if you go this route, you will still need to do some research on soundcards. Unfortunately, there is no standard capability with audio soundcards. Driver support often depends on the chipset of your pc. For example, the Echo cards support AMD and Intel chipsets, while Aardvark (last I checked) only supported Intel chips. For ultimate capability, many people figure out what their recording needs are, base the soundcard purchase on their needs, and build a pc based on the required chipset of that card.

      • If you want to play around with recording on your computer, then a better soundcard and some low-end software is realistic (I use and like Cakewalk’s Home Studio). I use a SBLive 5.1 card for normal stuff, but an Audiophile 2496 for audio recording. 16-bit recording is good enough for almost everything–you only really need 24-bit recording for cymbals.
  • But honestly, if you are really expecting to do better-quality recording, buy the software but skip buying any more PC hardware totally, and get yourself a hard-disk recorder. They are lots easier to use and much more portable than a PC will be. HD recorders can either burn CD’s or hook up with cables afterwards to transfer files to the PC for mixing–but the point here is that PC’s do not have the ideal architecture for doing easy-to-use multi-input recording, and for the cost and hassles that fixing those problems expends, a HD recorder is a better deal.
    ~

Thanks for the info, guys! Cyrokk: :eek: Nice setup. I think I’m going to spend somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1000-$2000 CDN, software excluded, so I’ll think about good monitors, a good soundcard with two ins, a couple of good mics, a blank midi keyboard, and a cheap-ass submixer.

I agree; it’s better to spend money on audio equipment than on computer hardware…

      • I do have two MIDI/electronic instruments I can offer comments on: an Evolution MK-149 midi-controller keyboard, and the Yamaha DD55 electronic drums:
  • The Evolution MK-149 is a midi controller that works well and doesn’t cost a lot. All its features work 100% as they should, but it is a controller only and not useable as a stand-alone instrument.
  • The Yamaha DD55 drums work as a (fair quality) stand-alone instrument, but the MIDI does not send properly. You’re supposed to be able to program what note each pad sends, but I could never get that feature to work right–and now that I look at ZZSounds, the review I put up pointing this out seems to be gone. Additionally the pads are located in the wrong places; the smaller pads should be aross the top as they are all the cymbal and non-drum sounds. And the speakers on it are tiny and sound poor–but it sounds pretty good hooked up to an amp with some big full-range speakers. I bought it because the only ones near it in price had fewer pads (most everything else under $500 US) or cost a lot more money (like the electronic stage kits, up around $1000). For its price it’s okay, but it has problems that a serious drummer really wouldn’t like.
    ~

KarmaComa (love the name, btw - big Massive Attack fan here, especially Protection).

I don’t have much to add from a computer set up standpoint - but as a guitar player, I am starting to research Line 6 Variax guitars - they use a special pickup and digital modelling to reproduce the sound of dozens of popular electric and acoustic guitars - Fenders, Gibsons, Rick’s (6 & 12), Martins (6 & 12), etc. I have talked to a couple of studio musician friends who say they are not 100% perfect in tone reproduction, but pretty damn close. And for a few hundred bucks, you get a ton of guitar sounds in a single guitar that can go DI really effectively.

Might be worth a check out.

Well twice I’ve typed out detailed replies and twice they’ve been eaten by the system so here it goes again:

If you’re going to use to your computer take Cyrokk’s advice and research the compatibilities between software, soundcards, chipsets, OS, and so on. It will mean the difference between happy music-making and wanting to throw your computer out the window. Once you settle on an application there’s probably a user forum and you can go there to get info on what works best.

If you just want to record audio without all the midi, virtual synths and editing stuff you might want to look at stand-alone HD recorders, like DougC said. You can still run a stereo line into your computer’s stock sound card and fool around with some inexpensive or free audio editing software.

Myself, I have a Dell P4 1.3 ghz with XP pro, a Creamware Luna Soundcard (stereo, but expandable to 8 in 8 out), and a Steinberg Midex 3 midi interface. I use Cubase, Propellerhead Reason, and Sampletank/Sonic Synth for writing and Wavelab for mastering and CD burning. My main outboard stuff is a Roland D-50 as a midi controller, Mackie mixers, KRK monitors, Stewart monitor amp, AKG mics (the less expensive ones), Joe Meek preamp, etc. Getting a low-latency soundcard is important if you’re going to use virtual synths like Sonic Synth and Reason.

It took a while to figure everything out and tweak my system to the point where it does what I want, but to me it was worth it. Now if I could just port the whole shebang - updates, patches, tweaks, and all to a faster box.