hitemupkadafi, your sound Max Digital audio card is a reasonable Analog Devices product. A good choice.

The problem you're most likely having is that with the audio mixer? Windows automatically includes both a playback/monitor mixer and a recording/input mixer. It would be so nice if Gates & Co. would have labeled their dual function mixer as such? Your sound card may have its own mixer program but since I don't know that program I'll indicate here how to use the Microsoft Windows mixer which generally will work in parallel with any included mixer application that came with the sound card.

So, here is your problem.

Your sound card may have included its own software mixer? I'm going to direct you with the built-in Windows sound card software mixer. Chances are, it's function will mimic a standard Windows Blaster generic sound card as opposed to the other more highly specialized USB and FireWire cards being mentioned and talked about here at Recording.org.

So let me show you the way to more efficient use of the Windows software mixers

Go to your start menu and select Programs, then Accessories, then Entertainment and then finally followed by Mixer. This will display the playback/monitor mixer. There you will find numerous selections such as " Master volume", " Wave", "Software synthesizer", CD player, microphone, PC speaker, etc.. There will also be other selections which are not applicable to your particular card and should not be selected. These particular selections are just your monitoring selections but may also be feeding input to software for recording, if so routed? You can check the routing by going to the "options" drop-down menu selecting "Properties" and then selecting " Recording". You will see now all of your input Recording options selections. This is where you will select your input source to record with to your software and generally you can only make a single selection which might also include the stereo playback monitor mix. You can leave this Recording mixer open and then go back to your start menu followed by programs followed by accessories and entertainment to make it back to the mixer selection again. You will now have 2 mixers displayed on your desktop (one might cover up the other one but you can move it out from under the the other one)! One is the input Recording mixer and one is the output monitoring mixer. You will now be able to select your microphone to monitor along with wave playback to monitor and you will also be able to select the microphone to record with. This should allow you to be able to hear your microphone, whether you are Recording or not. It is simple routing but nobody tells you that you can have both mixers open simultaneously. Generally only one signal source can be selected to record but there is an instance where you can select whatever is on the playback monitor mixer to record. It can become a tad confusing. I hope this helps to straighten out your monitoring problem? So you do not want to record anything but your microphone input. If you had selected the record playback monitor mix, you would be rerecording everything you are hearing over and over again, which is NOT what you want to do. You want to select just your single microphone as the recording source in the recording mixer. In the playback monitor mixer you want wave and microphone both selected and nothing else other than the master output.

This is basic signal routing utilizing a standard blaster style soundcard and included software within the operating system. Nothing fancy here. I haven't mentioned anything about software. Comprehensive and complicated software brings about its own monitoring problems. Software were you will have to learn its own internal routing for proper monitoring. You will be able to nicely ask questions here about your further monitoring dilemmas. You also have to articulate your problems with as much information as you can supply as generic questions get the kind of answers you disliked earlier. Your speaking to technical professionals and " it don't work? What do I do?" Says nothing about the problem. If you want to be a technical professional, you must learn how to speak like a technical professional so that people believe you might be a technical professional, when you want to take their money?

And in response to your previous angered response, we have a good sense of humor here at Recording.org. Many of us professionals have spent our entire careers in broadcasting and the recording arts and sciences, such as myself who have been over 36 years in the business. Some of us went to school to learn this stuff. Others of us have learned it in the school of hard knocks, reading lots of technical manuals, lots of trade publications, lots of doing it and having discussions with other professionals in a lighthearted way. Sometimes questions like yours come up from a person who has neither read nor experimented much before asking beginner questions of a most clueless nature. And so sometimes people can hardly believe their eyes and find much humor in clueless beginner questions like yours who haven't even read their manual to their new computer. Not to be offensive or anything but we generally deal with a higher caliber of questions of complexity than beginner entry-level instructions which were misunderstood or never read. But now you are equipped with a better knowledge of what is going on and how better to go about it and I didn't charge you a thing for wasting my time and knowledge on your question?

I hope you learn much here at Recording.org since I feel it is quite a superior site when trying to better understand audio and how to record it effectively.

A real smart ass Moderator on the forum
Ms. Remy Ann David

THANK YOU MISS REMY.I WILL TRY IT!!!! AND YOU ARE A VERY SMART WOMAN!!

hey miss remy it didnt work i followed your directions and it didnt work.. the input output windows, they had little boxes with check markes in them, such as mic., mono, line in, ect....what boxes need to be checked and which ones dont in each window?