Hello and greetings to all members, my name is Josh, first time poster on this forum.
I am quite familiar with a Linux/UNIX environment, but I am not familiar with digital audio and recording. I am currently reading a couple books, Linux Music & Sound and I forget the name of the other. I am very interested in using Ardour in a non-production environment, but I do not want to sacrifice any quality that I may be able to achieve. Here is my current situation. I use openSUSE10.2 for my recording station. It is running on a 3.2 P4 Prescott core (1 MB L2 cache), 2 gigabytes of PC3200 DDR, and 240 GIG RAID-5 SATA. The motherboard is an Abit IC7 Intel Chipset.
Is this sufficient for a recording station?
I also have a question about which sound card I should use. I do not want top of the line, but can someone recommend a “budget” priced sound card that would work with 1 channel of recording at a time. I do not need to record live audio just 1 track at a time. The instruments will all be “live” i.e. guitars, drums, bass guitars, and vocals.
Can anyone recommend to a newbie how to get started out in this vast world of digital audio recording? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Yes, your setup is sufficient for a recording station.
I’m running a 1,4 GHz Athlon with 1 GB Ram (266MHz), 160 GB UDMA6 HDD and a bad sis900 MB chipset. Normaly I use about 10-12 channels and each channel with about 2-3 LADSPA effects in my mix and it works good. For much more effects my CPU is too slow, but you see that you should be able to do a lot with your stuff
I use 2 M-audio soundcards - 1 with 2in/2out channels (M-Audio Audiophile 24/96) and 1 with 8in/8out channels (M-Audio 1010LT). Both are equiped with a SPDIF in/out.
The quality is really good - you can record your signals with up to 24 bits and 96kHz. Maybe check out the M-Audio homepage and searched the internet.
If you really need only 1 channel at a time, the Audiophile 24/96 is a possibility for you - you can record 2 mono (1 stereo) signals at a time with it. This card costs about 80-100 Euro (a bit more in dollars).
Maybe have a thought about more channels - If you want to record a drumset, you’ll maybe need more channels than 2. The M-Audio 1010LT offers 8 (mono) channels to record. The price is about 200-250 Euro. There’s also a more professional version of the card with a break-out box but the price is about 2x as high.
Remember that you’ll need mic-preams in front of the cards (they only have line-ins).
I can only write about these cards as I own no others. But they are very well supported in ALSA, the quality is great, and the price is good for the level of quality offered.