Mic It Or Plug It? Grr. Options

[Salsashark]

So yeah. What do you guys say? I'm recording in my tiny room. Should I record using mics, and if so, what should I be looking for? Or.... do you guys know of any good, cheap (ish) interfaces so I plug in and record. Do not have money for digi 001 so yeah something below that. I have an iBook. Any help is good. Thank you.

[xenonaut]

Arg, why is this complicated?!

T1mon,

It's really not - in fact, it's much easier than it has ever been in the past.

Really, it's very simple:

You want the sound of an amplified guitar. So, mic an amplifier, and you're all set.

OR, use a device which emulates the effect of mic-ing an amplifier. There are a ton of options out there.

As for the computer, well, that brings with it *some* complication (so far, computers always do). If you don't want to deal with that, and this whole thing is not fun/interesting for you, then pick up a conventional multitrack recorder, from Fostex, Tascam, Yamaha, or whomever you please.

If you want to work with the computer, all you have to do is choose a decent audio capture device and software package. Again, there are tons of them, and most of them are pretty good. It just depends on what you're trying to accomplish, and how much money you can spend.

As for latency, look: latency is a problem when you are trying to record, especially if you are trying to synch your time to existing tracks, because it results in a delay between you play and what you hear. This is easy enough to avoid, *if* you are not depending on monitoring your playing by listening to it after it has gone from analog to digital, sent over a USB bus, been processed and then sent back out over a USB bus to be converted back to analog so youo can hear it. So, monitor your live playing in the analog domain. You can use a small mixer for this, or some audio interfaces support zero latency or "low-latency monitoring" (where the audio is digitized and then switched back to analog within the interface, so it doesn't have to go through the bus and into the computer before you hear it).

As for the PODxt: check Mac compatibility (as I said earlier, I know that Line 6 claims that the Guitar Port, which would otherwise be your cheapest option in that category, is NOT Mac compatible), and consider whether the PODxt will also serve as an acceptable audio interface for other sources which you might wish to capture (Vocals? Acoustic instruments? External drum machines, hardware samplers/sysnths, etc.?) before you paint yourself into a corner.