Beginner Interface, Daw... Options

[T1mon]

There might be some topics about this already but you don't mind writing a little, do you?

I'm a guitar player and want to start to record some of my stuff. (not that it's worth it but it's nice if you can record it together with a drum loop or something like that and to capture ideas on hd)

I would be using a 12" 867mhz Powerbook with 640MB Ram and OSX.
I tried putting my guitar directly into the line in of the PB and then using Audacity to record. As a preamp I use Amplitube Live.
But with that setup I had quite some latency which I think comes from Amplitube because when I play guitar and for example open a window or scroll it takes about 1-2 seconds to do that... not really nice.

So one of my questions is now if this problem would be history with a nice interface? (this one looks nice: M-Audio MobilePre USB

I'm also looking for a nice recording program. There are so many out there and I really have no idea which one to get. I don't need anything professional, it just has to record my guitar and maybe be able to insert a drum loop. (I'm currently using Fruity Loops on a crappy PC but I could get Reason)
So I don't midi.

I hope you understood what I mean. Thx!

[xenonaut]

T1mon,

I don't think your latency is from the audio capture method you are using; I think Amplitube Live seems to bog down the system. Hopefully they'll clean up the code a bit.

I recently found myself in your position (more or less). I'm a guitarist and wanted to be able to capture and develop song ideas on my Powerbook. Mine has no onboard audio input, so I needed to consider capture, as well. I also wanted *basic* MIDI, just because I wanted the flexibility to change the drum track later.

The cheapest solution I found was Deck with a Griffin iMic, but there was *no* MIDI, and I had a lot of problems with spurious noise in Deck (I later learned that Deck is *very* picky about HD performace, and I was using the built-in, so maybe this could have been resolved).

I looked at other solutions like Logic's BigBox package and Cubase SX. They were ok (especially SX, except that it was pricey and wouldn't recognize my USB audio capture devices) but not really what I was looking for.

Eventually, I went with the Digidesign MBox. I paid a little over $400 US, and it solves my audio capture problem *and* gives me Pro Tools LE. Pro Tools is not *perfect*, but it *is* an industry standard of sorts, gives me enough MIDI that I can record with a click track and add drums later without synch problems, and has pretty good audio editing features. Overall, I've been pretty pleased.

You (maybe) don't need the audio interface (although I suspect the quality of the MBox is much better than the onboard audio in), so you might have more options. If you're running OS 9 (or capable of running it, and willing to boot it), you could try out the Pro Tools Free version from Digidesign's site. It's limited to 8 tracks; if that's enough for you (and you can run OS 9), you've got a free solution. If you think that's *not* enough for you, it would still give you a chance to play with Pro Tools and see what the environment is like. I've been satisfied with Pro Tools LE.

Otherwise, you could look at software-only solutions from Logic, Cubase, Mark of the Unicorn, Sagan (Metro), or as previously recommended, Ableton (Live).

By the way, I tried Amplitube Live and was not very impressed with performance. The Amplitube PlugIn seems to work *much* better. You might consider other options for getting the guitar sound you want: perhaps a Pod or the (much cheaper and reputedly quite good) Behringer V-Amp. I plug into a Carvin Quad-X tube preamp for basic tone, and then process in software with various PlugIns (including Amplitube).

One more thing: you might consider a 7200 RPM FireWire HD. I mentioned that Deck is especially picky about HD speed, but in truth, all DAW environments need a fast drive, ideally one which is not your system drive (and your Powerbook's internal drive is probably no faster than 5400 RPM, if it's even that fast). Furthermore, audio projects tend to use a lot of disk space.

Good luck.

Ce message a été modifié par xenonaut - mer. 23 juil. 2003, 09:45.