recording mixes advice.....

[tomgrant(headrush)]

I used to use Garageband to record my mixes etc but as i have moved i wont have my mac in my new place for a while now, and besides it was very slow to load and bounce large files from GB and i never really like using it much. I was wondering if anyone had any golden advice on some posible options....

1. Wait until i can get my mac over, (however long that takes) and learn to love garageband.

2. Get a program like Audacity to work on the cheap laptop i have right now - which seems to have no sound card meaning sound quality is terrible.

3. Buy some sort of mobile / field recorder - meaning recordings bounce quickly, and gives me the possibiliy of doing field recordings, etc that i could always sample, and help me record presentations for work or whatever....but involves spending money - fairly tight budget. Also not sure what recorders are good or not, whether a mobile / field recorder is best or more of a multi-tracker is better.


any help would be much appreciated

cheers

[Block Party]

You could try Reaper on the PC, but would be better to get some form of interface. Reaper is free to try, uncrippled and isn't particularly expensive should you wish to buy.

There are lots of field recorders however the Olympus LS10 http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/2581_digital_recorder_ls-10_18555.htm is well regarded as well as the Zoom H4 http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h4/ I would probably go for the Zoom.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec06/articles/zoomh4.htm

Zoom do a cheap one though http://www.dv247.com/studio-equipment/zoom-h1-portable-digital-recorder--73416 Which I know nothing about.

[tomgrant(headrush)]

  thank-you very much for the advice on this its much appreciated. I will be checking out all that.....

ive never found an effective and simple way to record mixes. Used to use cool edit pro back in the day

[Block Party]

I have always used Cubase for my mixes, but I have been using Reaper on my second Mac to record some old tapes. It seems like a good programme and it has a large user base, but I've only really used it in its most basic way; as a tape recorder.

[tomgrant(headrush)]

took me a while to get reaper working properly. It sounded shite at first but it turned out i just need to change the sample rate 96000 works perfect! cheers for the help  a mix will be on the way soon.

[Block Party]

took me a while to get reaper working properly. It sounded shite at first but it turned out i just need to change the sample rate 96000 works perfect! cheers for the help  a mix will be on the way soon.

96K sounds high! Make sure your drivers are up to date as you shouldn't need to record at 96. Anyway, if it is working, then you can always bounce it down to 44.1 when you've finished. Make sure you record in 24bit as you will have more headroom. Don't record too hot either, about -10dbFS for the peaks should be fine, you can always increase the gain after recording and use some gentle limiting to take of the peaks and increase the overall level.

[tomgrant(headrush)]

yeah i need to play around a bit with it and i think a large problem is my notebook is too crap at processing the sound so when it went in on standard settings it sounded tiny and like there was a filter over it so i bumped up the sample rate and it sounds fine now,  a bit high on the low end maybe. I render at 44.1 anyway so that the file is not so big. Im not the best with this sort of stuff so ive just been playing around so far, but it looks like the program has a lot of features and i can probably get it going better.

[Block Party]

I've barely used it, but Reaper is a full fledged DAW (digital audio workstation) like Logic or Cubase. It should have all the tools you need or if you need more there are many (genuinely) free plug ins on the net. Adjusting buffer settings will help take some of the strain off of the CPU, but it increses latency, which isn't an issue if you are not monitoring through the programme, but just recording and then playing back.

[Jimmy_P]

What soundcard are you using?

If its an internal soundcard on a laptop I'd be surprised if it was running at 96k.

If its a stock soundcard try asio4all as your driver:

http://www.asio4all.com/

Install it, then in Reaper or whatever sofware you use there will be an audio options menu to select asio as driver. Set it to 44.1 khz and whack latency up high to reduce cpu strain.

24bit would be preferable to 16bit to give you more headroom, but if your soundcard cannot convert at 24bit theres no point. 16bit is fine.