A "standard" sound card will only record two tracks (one stereo, or two mono tracks) - if you want to do multitrack recording you will need to get a more advanced sound card.

Cool Edit Pro 2.0 will record up to 32 tracks at once - with the proper hardware.

my sound card has a line in,line out, and a mic in. Your saying i can only record say the snare and bass on seperate tracks and if i wanted to record say the whole kit (each drum on a seperate track) I would need a more advanced sound card?

What kind of Soundcard would be good for whhat i'm looking for?
{Budget}

Also could u tell me how i would go about hooking up the mixer to the soundcard if i wanted to do "multitrack recording?"

Thanks

Your mixer can plug into the LINE in on your sound card to give you 2 tracks. You don't want to use the onboard microphone preamp - it won't give you good quality.

I'm sure there are already a lot of message thread about sound cards - MIA is one that comes to mind - but that isn't my area of expertise. Someone else will have to chime in with sound card advice.

if i plug my mixer into the line in how would i get 2 different drums on two seperate tracks?

geee man forget it!
if you have a mixer! you may connect all the mics and stuff you want but when you connect it to the soundcard (if it's a laptop it surely is some **** card) you only record at the most a stereo track!
my laptop doesn't record stereo! only mono with one of those shity mic in! i had to buy a gizmo usb for recording stereo.
if you have stereo recording what you can do is pan the overheads hard left and hard right! then after you recorded it with cool edit make a copy of each channel and then paste on a new mono track! you'll get right and left channels separately!
that's the best you can get newbie!

i've used some motu hardware (828 to be exact) via firewire on my laptop. got it for 300 or so on ebay, used it for 6 months then sold it back and even made 10 bucks on the deal. you need something like a 4 channel or 8 channel interface. they will be usb2.0 or firewire, so you will need to get a pcmcia card with that connection for your laptop unless it already has it. try ebay to just get an idea of whats out there. or, like they said, use a mixer to get all your sounds just right. you wont be able to seperate the tracks later, but if you get it right you may not have to...