newbiekid,
The Aardvark Q10 is a good choice. I hate the Presonus mic pres, so I won't recommend it in any form ... The Q10 has class A mic pres and benefits from Aardvarks clocking technology.

In my rig, after a lot of soul searching and research on the net (this is actually how I found RO in the first place) I decided to go with 2 Alesis AI3 interfaces and a Frontier Dakota audio card for a total of 18 24 bit ins and outs. I purchased them all together at Guitar Center and am about $1100 into it ... I have used this set up now for a couple of years and I am very satisfied with it. Not one hiccup in all that time. Excellent drivers and implimentation ... I expect to continue using this set up for some time into the future. keep in mind this is line ins and outs only. It does not include mic pres ... which I think is a better way to go anyway. If I ever buy better converters, I still have all my pres ... .

Thanks for your help... I definately will be thinking on this one for a while. I like your idea of being able to upgrade what you need and keep what you want but i can't let the price get too out of hand.
-Mark

Another Noob

Hey everyone, great site here. Please don't give me any flack for being such a noob and being so geto in my recording techniques, LOL!

I'm pretty green when it comes to any kind of recording. I've used Acid 4.0 to make loops and I have a SoundBlaster Live sound card that I use to record vocals. Right now, that's all I know how to do.

I've been saving some money and a friend told me to get a mac if I want to get serious about music, which I do. He recommends I get the following:

iBook w/1Ghz proc. (Base Model)
external sound card (he didn't say which kind)

That's pretty much all he said. I can only record in my room but I want to be able to record on the go, cuz I don't have my own place. I need a DAW that will allow me to utilize my head phones and mic. Also, I have a friend that I record with so I need a system where I can have 2 mics and 2 headphones used at the same time.

Any suggestions? I know, I'm Rilly Geto right now.

Thanks for ur help

RillyGeto,

First of all if you get a Mac then you won't be able to use Acid since it's only a PC program. You can do serious audio on a PC too so don't get stuck in your friend's notion of Macs being the only computers suitable for professional audio.

Ditch the Soundblaster. There are a number of soundcards to choose from so you'll have to do some research but I've heard good things about Echo, M-Audio, Egosys, Aardvark, and RME products as well as the Frontier Dakota Kurt mentioned above.

In my various computers I have an M-Audio Studiophile 2496, Egosys Wamirack 24, and an Egosys Waveterminal 192M all of which I'm happy with and all of which have caused me zero troubles.

Being able to use headphones and a mic is dependent on your soundcard/mixer setup, not your DAW. Acid should do fine for you for now if you don't need to record you and your friend at the same time. If recording 2 or more tracks at the same time is a must, try Sony's [[url=http://[/URL]="http://mediasoftwar…"]Vegas[/]="http://mediasoftwar…"]Vegas[/]

Dave

Thanks a bunch Dave!

I'll look into the Vegas. Recording simultaneously is an absolute must. See what we do is record at the same time for a live spontaneouse freestyle effect. We had simply been using a Y-spliter, but I'm sure you can imagine how lame that is. Also, when we use a spliter for the headphones, volume is decreased significantly.

We've been having a hard time finding places to record so we figured we'd get a notebook for portability and use that to record, mix and burn cds of our material, on the spot.

One more thing, is it capable of recording 2 mics simultaneously on 2 separate tracks? For example, when we record, sometimes one voice is louder than the other and when one of us is doing lead, the background sometimes takes over the vocal.

We tried recording separately, as it's easier to manipulate volume and sound. However, our music really relies on feeding off one another and spontaneity, we don't write any of our material. Hard to explain, hope you can understand what I need.

Thanks again!

Sounds like you're playing in the great tradition of the Jam Bands. i.e. Grateful Dead, Donna the Buffalo, Darkstar etc. In my opinion this produces a much better product than all the tracking and overdubbing. That said, I use an Omega Lexicon external sound card with built-in pre-amps. With ProTracks software, it's less than 200 dollars at GC. It provides two mic inputs with preamps and four line-ins. Two of the line-ins share the same circuitry as the mike inputs so you don't have six simultaneous inputs but four of any combination.
It uses 24 bit sampling and mixes down with 16bit for cd burning. I've only heard it mentioned once in this forum, but it works great for me. I guess the pros would have more input at > cost and probably a whole lot of reasons why this would be a bum choice, but hey, like I said, it works for me.