The Steel Guitar Forum

Is it possible to use standard on-board sound on a laptop (DELL latitude) to get a decent audio recording or do you have buy an add on soundcard? I've tried it with just the standard audio input on the laptop to record my guitar and then I used CoolEdit v2.0 to capture and modify the recording. I get a lot of hiss. Even using the noise reduction utility in CoolEdit doesn't fix it. Do I have to buy a special soundcard?

thanks for any advice

It's possible but unlikely. Your best chance is to get an external mixer like a Mackie 1202 to boost the signal going in. That will overpower the noise. Laptops are generally not good choices for recording. By the way, you can get a Yamaha DSP Factory PCI card on ebay now for about $200. That's an EXCELLENT deal. These cards were $1000 when they came out and are still worth every bit of that price. They will do 2 stereo tracks out of the box and will do 8 stero tracks (or 16 mono) if you add some other hardware. There are compressors, limiters, parametric EQ and more on every channel as well as 5 high quality stereo fx processors.
gs


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• Gary Shepherd
• Sierra Session 12
• www.16tracks.com

The inputs on (my) laptops are line level, so if you use a mic it will be noisy. Try getting a mic pre-amp or small mixer. I've done a few things this way and it works ... not too bad. There is also a PCMCIA card that has RCA, XLR, and S/PDIF ins and outs. I saw it at musiciansfriend.com

Hey, thanks Herb. That site has the Digigram VXpocket 440 I was thinking of.