Search options (Page 29 of 121)

Go to "Control Panel->Sound" and then make sure USB codec is selected for both recording and playback.

Keep at it Pete!  It will all come together....

Classic wisdom... 

If you're getting a lot of noise, turn the gain down and the channel volume up.   You'll use the channel volume knobs to control your mix along with the "Main" volume pot.  Channel volumes will control only that channel strip, and the "Main" volume is your master output that controls the volume going to the computer.   It's OK to leave a lot of headroom on the gain knob.  It lets you hit the track later with more effects without clipping.

Anyway, you are about to get into the wonderful world of "routing."    It is easier to understand if you imagine each part of your mixer as a separate bit of hardware.   So your mixer might have the channel strips in one part, the effects processor in another, the main outputs in another, and the monitor outputs in another.   For each box there are two cables.  One cable sends audio to it, and the other receives audio from it.  You can switch the cabling around to various parts of the mixer before they end up at the mains and monitors.

So for example the simplest configuration has the mixing channels connected to the main outputs.   You have another box called the "effects" box that you can send audio to directly from individual channel strips and have the sent audio (called the "wet" signal) merged back into the unprocessed audio (the "dry" signal) before it hits the mains and your ears.

So lets do this the same way.

On your mixer, select the effect you want to use.
Turn the FX Return Level all the way up.
On the channels you want to use effects on, turn the FX Post Send dial all the way down.
Press the "Main to Monitor" button.
Make some noise for your microphone and slowly turn the FX Post Send dial up. 

You should hear the signal become more and more changed as you "send" more audio to the effects processor.

So in this case, the FX Post Send knob controls how much signal will go to the FX processor, and the "FX Return Level" controls how much comes back.  You can dial them up or down to taste.   The "Main to Monitor" button just connects the mains to your monitoring headphones, which are separately routed. 

This allows you to use the effects on multiple tracks.  For example if you wanted a lot of reverb on the guitar and just a touch on your vocals, you could do that by "sending" a lot of the guitar track and a little of the vocal track.

When you hear people talking about "send effects,"  this is what they mean.  You are "sending" some of the audio to somewhere else, and merging that return signal back into the mix.

I also just realized that when I am talking about clipping signals, I mean the red light on the channel strip itself.  That is the one that shouldn't come on.  The signal meter lights on the right side of the mixer should be showing activity.  That is the signal going to the mains.  My bad for not catching that. 

Don't worry about the LED lighting up.  That doesn't mean you're recording, it means the gain is too high for the mixer to handle and your signal is clipping. It's a warning to turn the gain down.

If you're hearing your voice in the headphones, then the audio is getting through the mixer, it's just not getting to your PC.

Set everything up again, go to your computer's Control Panel and select "Sound."  Then select the "Recording" Tab.    You should see the USB Codec there.  Make sure it is selected and set it as default.   

Then try your webcam again and see how that works.

You need a microphone,  you need something to convert the audio data into digital data, you need something to record that digital data.

Alternately, you need an old cassete tape boom-box and a bunch of D cell batteries.  (It worked for Nirvana, after all.)  The best brand for that was JVC.

The questions you've asked don't really mean anything until we know what you want from your recordings.  Are they going to be just for your own amusement?  Are you putting together a demo tape?  Are you recording more than one person?  What kind of space do you have for recording?  How much money are you willing to spend?  What are your quality expectations?  Have you ever done recording before?

The answers to those kinds of questions will inform the answers to yours.   You can spend as little as free for Uncle Wierdo's old tape box, or if you're fortunate, millions of dollars on fully treated recording spaces with the finest Neumann microphones God ever invented.

Here, we tend to focus on economically reasonable basement and garage style recording.  There are a ton of aspects that would make something the "best" brand, depending on what your needs are.  For me, whatever is fairly mobile, durable, and easy to use is best.  For you it may be something else.

So tell us your plans, and you'll get all kinds of help. 

Oh yeah!  Congrats on the mixer upgrade, too.  On board effects can be nice, and the two extra channels are always good to have around!

The one I'm playing right now.

Sounds like you answered your own question. 

Armstrong doped and I don't care!
Armstrong doped and I don't care!
Armstrong doped and I don't care!
Because everyone in cycling dopes! (And everyone knows it.)

I seriously don't get the Armstrong hate.   If you strip him of his titles and give those tour wins to the #2 guy, you will have to consider the fact that the #2 guy in every one of Armstrong's wins is also a doper.  The guy that won the tour in 2006 after Armstrong quit was a doper. 

Cycling is as dirty a sport as there is and my policy on it "so what."  It's a bike race.  Ride faster.

You know what I do care about?  The half a billion dollars Armstrong's charity raised for cancer survivors and cancer awareness.   That is now at risk because people want to believe he's a scumbag because he doped in a sport where everyone dopes.   They want to focus on "he cheated" instead of "if he didn't cheat, that half a billion dollars in good work never would have existed."

I was thinking something along the lines of WebEx or some other remote desktop sharing tool.  The trick with Reaper is understanding how routing works.   If you can get your head around that, the rest of the tool is pretty basic.  The problem with that is that Routing is specific to whatever your Audio interface is.    While the steps are all pretty much the same, the specifics are going to be different for each interface.   Reaper will present some things differently for my TASCAM than they will  for Pete's Asus, for example.

I might try something with Skype, though, just to see how it works.

That thing is cool!   

I use Macs for recording so driver issues generally don't effect me (Core Audio rules) but I would be shocked if Vista or Win7 was unable to run an XP driver.     Since it ships with Stienberg Cube, and Stienberg also specified the ASIO format that most new computers are shipping with, including Win7, that it should work for you.

You could always ask their support department if the drivers are compatible, though.  Those guys are always happy to sell more stuff.

How do you like the SR16?  I primarily use software drum kids (iDrum as a VST plugin or Reason Redrum as a MIDI channel into Reaper), and I have a control surface to "play" them physically,  but it's not really all that satisfying.  I've wavered between getting one of those electronic drum sets with a MIDI output, but they are kind of spendy, but a beefier drum machine might help.

And since you're using the Tascam as the mixer, are you recording all tracks separately, or just the master?   I recently bought a Behringer X2222USB mixer and was a bit upset when I learned that I only get the two master channels off of the USB, rather than the 24 channels I get coming into it.