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Old 12-16-2007, 12:27 PM   #1
Stormieweather
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Music mixing software

My BF and I have some old recording equipment to record music we play - a Yamaha Multi-track recorder and a Roland Rhythm Composer (neither of us play drums), along with an amp and stereo monitor. I play keyboard and do vocals, he plays guitar.

However, I've found the track recorder incredibly cumbersome to use and feel that surely there is some decent, not-too-expensive equipment that we can use to record to a PC and mix the tracks digitally. I have no idea what I'm looking for or at (when I do see it).

Is there any sort of gizmo that we can get to hook our instruments directly to one of our many PC's and lay down tracks? And if so, what sort of software is available to mix the tracks? I don't want to pay an arm and a leg either, just curious if anyone knows of any reasonably priced product that will do what I want?

Stormie
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Old 12-16-2007, 10:25 PM   #2
smoothmoniker
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I think I can give some help here. A few questions:

1) mac or pc?

2) how tech savy are you? If something is free but requires a little more technical know how to get it working, would that work?
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Old 12-17-2007, 07:44 AM   #3
glatt
 
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I love Audacity, which is free open source software and pretty easy to use. I had no music software experience before using it, and after about an hour of reading tutorials and fiddling around with it, I'm pretty good at cleaning up record pops and static, etc. I've transferred all my old vinyl albums to CD by using it. You just connect your stereo amp (or other music source) to the line-in jack in the back of your PC. You might have to buy an RCA to 1/8th inch jack adapter cable at radio shack for $15 or so.

I haven't done mixing with it, but this page gives an explanation of mixing. It appears you can only mix two tracks at a time. which means you have to mix two, save it into one, and then you can add a third track to that saved combined track. By saving as you go, you can add unlimited tracks.
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Old 12-17-2007, 08:01 AM   #4
Stormieweather
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We have PC's and my partner is a computer wiz, so he could probably handle most things. They're

I've read about Audacity, but what do you use to record to the PC? A mic? If so, you would have to deal with background noise right? I mean, we have three kids and nothing even vaguely resembling a soundproof room to record in...lol.
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Old 12-17-2007, 09:52 AM   #5
glatt
 
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My PC, which is nothing special, has a line-in jack and also mic jacks. Whatever you can plug in to either of those holes can be recorded into Audacity.

My stereo's amp had the typical RCA outputs that are meant to go to a tape deck. I connected one of these y shaped cables to those RCA outputs and plugged the other end into the line-in jack on the back of the PC.

I know nothing about musical instruments, so can't comment on the best way to connect yours to your PC. What sort of output does your keyboard use? How about his guitar? You could always use a mic, but there's got to be some cable setup you can do to get your music directly into the 1/8 inch jack in the back of your PC.

Edit: In the link above, you want to plug the black connector into the PC and the white and red ones into the music source. I actually had a longer cable than this, but this was a good picture to show what the cable does.
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