Multiple USB Input recording IS needed. No it is not “DUMMB” to want this feature.
Nowadays, in this here day and age, the way you connect guitar amplifiers (even cheap ones like peavy vip 1 (and yea I spelt peavy wrong, hope you notice)) is by a USB cable. The way you connect microphones are by a USB cable. So on and so forth.
This is the truth.
What is needed is support for simultaniously recording from these multiple “soundcards” at once.
And no PCM_MULTI with alsa does not cut it. Multi-input (AKA multi track recording which, No, in this day and age you do not support because things changed and now everything is a sound card) recording is needed so later one can adjust the levels of the recording and fix the mix.
No it is NOT dumb to want or have this feature. Please spare the "well duh cloks will drift away bla bla bla and thusly this is a terrible idea (because we don’t support multiple inputs silmultaniously, thusly I gotta find away to justify why you’re dummb for wanting that or needing it). No a 1k firewire device isn’t the answer either (unless you have a mac).
No I am not dummmb for wanting this nor is anyone else since 2007.
Please, a solution. And if jack or whatever can’t do it connect the the sources directly please.
No you connect guitar amps through a microphone, and said microphone through a decent interface, go to just about any professional studio in the country(US or world really) and I guarantee this is what they are doing, and likely in 90+% of home studios as well and that is being generous. Very rarely do you deal with multiple USB devices in studio recording, and the only time you should be doing it is when you are sample locked.
There are many reasons why doing what you suggest is a bad idea. There are ways around it, even in Linux though, but it is not a good idea in most cases.
@ceet: Check this: http://jackaudio.org/multiple_devices . Haven’t tried it yet, but there are tools to use multiple soundcards for recording. It should also work with Ardour.
There is a reason we use a single interface with multiple inputs rather than cheaper single input interfaces. It just works better that way. there are probably other more serious issues asweel, maybe latency workarounds are just too complex for it to work on a consistant basis.
Just because you can by an audio device that simply plugs in to a usb port doesnt mean you can just plug in everything that way and not need to have an interface.
I work as a live sound engineer, and no where have i seen USB microphones used, even with digital systems, there is still an a/d converter which runs through what is essential a multiple input interface.
We still use mainly for professional work, jack cables and xlr.
These USB devices are just usefull tools for quick get a signal into your computer so you can record it, its not meant to replace multitrack recording
you don’t need a MAC for a good firewire interface…pcie firewire cards can be bought for very little and the coverage of ffado (ffado.org) is reasonable. Although there are also good multichannel USB converters which are even cheaper… A microphone (or 2) placed correctly will always sound better than a digital signal through USB… a lot of engineers often record a clean signal (no distortion e.t.c.) from the AMP too… but in most cases that signal is fed back through their amplifier of choice and recorded back through a microphone…