I am looking at getting a sound card that can take a regular instrument (guitar/amp) jack into it for recording purposes. (I have an eight/sixteen track program to record into.) However, I am not really sure what can accomplish this. I would actually prefer to have something that can opperate out of a usb port to save some of my serial pubs on the inside of my pc, in addition to the problems of accessing said jacks where my pc is located.
Does anyone know what I should look for in order to accomplish this?
I suspect you are looking for a 1/4" phone plug, rather than the sound card standard of 1/8". I don’t think anyone makes one, at least in a sub $200 price. You can easily convert 1/4" mono jacks to 1/8" sterio though. Radio Shack amoung many others have such adapters.
Sound Cards typically don’t use any serial or other ports. (They do use a PCI or ISA slot on the motherboard, if that’s what you mean. I believe Creative Labs makes a USB sound card.
You may have to run your instrument through a preamp so you don’t under or over drive the sound card.
I must look into the Creative labs port. I would rather attach the instrument via some type of usb hookup. What I am looking for may require one of those over $200 prices you mention. If that is the case I guess I will keep practicing away on my 4 track before going back to the studio. The only bad thing is that I don’t get the sound quality off the 4 track that I believe I would off of the computer.
Okay, One Fact: the Creative Audigy line plays 24-bit sound, but can only record in 16-bits. Yea, I know, they say it does, but that’s marketing techno-doublespeak. All the audio files recorded with it only have 16-bit depth, and there are many very-not-happy owners because if it.
The difference in recording quality between a $30 OEM Soundblaster Live 5.1 card and the newest $120+ Audigy line has been found by more than a couple independent testers to be fairly small. If you’re not going to be real picky about recording quality, save your money and just get yourself an OEM SBLive 5.1 soundcard for $30, it can do all the basic things you need, and recordings done on it still sound way better than a cassette tape (-if you choose to do this, be certain that you get the model with hardware Dolby 5.1 decoding, it’s the only version that has all the features).
To hook up guitars and stage mics, you need a convertor. The MAudio AudioBuddy is one of the least expensive ones, for around $80 US. You plug your mics or guitar into this, and then this plugs into the soundcard’s line-in. You cannot connect stage mics or guitars directly to a regular soundcard’s line-in or mic.
I’m a great proponent of the SBLive, because for a $30 soundcard you can do some pretty nice recording with it. If you find that you don’t like the way it sounds, then the next card up in quality is the AudioPhile 2496, for about $150. It does record in 24-bits/96 Khz, and has a lower noise level than the SBL or the Audigy cards do. It’s commonly considered to be the cheapest “good” recording soundcard available. Skip the Audigy cards entirely, they are a waste of money.
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Yea, well, you and- . . -eh, -you and everybody just better get one of them Audigy-Two’s, and not the original Audigies!
[counting pocket change]
-Yessir!
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