Start out with a head ache

timmer1112 said:
Since you seem to be obsessing over my education and feel the need to be an idiot on the internet because no one will take you seriously in real life, my class was FREE. It was high school, I am an 18 year old aspiring musician, at some point in your depressed life you were probably in a very similar position. All my training in music has gone towards singing and classical music theory and musicology, so SORRY for asking a FORUM of musicians to help a brother out. One of the reasons I turned here so quickly was because "Banjo Mart" as you so affectionately want to call it wasn't a solid source of information. So why not try and learn from real musicians? People who will post legit help and answers and lead me to an understanding of something I know almost nothing about. People unlike you, who just feel the need to post mindless babble in order to talk down to the "noob" and feel all high and mighty about yourself. I guess a Napolean complex is in order, or maybe we should call it a Mozart Complex. He was pretty short right? Oh. But he had talent, didn't he?
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I did give you a legit answer, amigo.

FWIW, Mr. Reading Comprehension, some of the other guys really jumped your shit re: lack of initiative on your part.

I did no such thing.

You're the one getting all obsessively defensive about your crappy educational experience. As if that is my fault.

c7sus said:
Your first mistake was going to Banjo Mart.

Is the Ableton a crack? Be honest.

Take the Icicle back and get a USB-powered full-duplex interface. The Icicle is designed for podcasting and not for doing overdubs.

When you get an interface, turn off all the screen saver/anti-virus/whatever other bullshit you have running besides your DAW.

The interface IS your soundcard. Disable the internal soundcard on the laptop and route everything through the USB interface.

Also please post the name of the school where you took this recording class because they didn't teach you jackshit.
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DO! Get an interface with MIDI ports.
Yes, many keyboards come equipped with USB but that just allows them to work on a computer, you still do not have a MIDI "interface". This last allows the connection of any other MIDI device, a drum machine, MIDI controller even a relatively cheap "Portasound" type keyboard which will nonetheless give you not only access to a vast variety of sounds but also allow you to learn the nuts&bolts of MIDI.

The addition of MIDI ports to an AI need not increase its cost, the Steinberg UR22 is a stonking little interface with MIDI but cost LESS than much of the MIDIless competition.

MIDI is a fantastic success story for industry co-operation, we lose its real functions at our peril and for a ha'poth of tar?

Dave.
 
I'm not picking on you, but just pointing out a comparison. "Honey, I bought this nice cushion but now we're going to have to redecorate the whole house." You have one part of the equation; the mic. Your laptop is not up to the task. I have an ASUS i7 laptop that i paid $500 for and it is designed for audio, video, and animation. The i6's might be a bit iffy. Go online and check about whether the sound card is the real problem, but my guess is your laptop is just not made for recording. All the other advice is correct but if you are not using a powerful enough cpu, you will always have problems. I would look online for you but I don't know what your laptop specs are. You might try a site called gearslutz. It's a forum dealing with these issues.
Rod Norman
Engineer
timmer1112 said:
So for a while now I have been working with electronic music (took a class in school and fell in love with DAW software and the whole field of music)

I am a classical vocalist by trade, and figured that I should pick up a mic and power supply to start recording my self into electronic tracks and work on boosting my classical recording portfolio with midi accompanied recordings and the like.

Much to my happiness my old musicianship teacher decided to purchase a Neummann u87 for the school's recording studio. (As a music charter we have around 40k invested into small recording studio for the students.) Because he picked up the new mic for the school and because I asked nicely he sold me the TLM 103 we have had for only a couple of years for pennies on the dollar.

I was so excited to get my hands on it. However, I had the issue of a beautiful mic that I had used several times at school to make beautiful recordings with, but no set up to use it.

So obviously I ran down to my local Guitar Center and starting finding out a way to interface it with my laptop. When I got home is where I ran into some seriously depressing issues.

I needed an inexpensive way of interfacing (I spent most of my money on the mic) and the helpful staff set me up with the Blue Icicle as an easy way of interfacing my components until I had the money to invest in a real preamp interface and mixer station.

I found quickly (within about 15 minutes of getting home) that I had a serious issue in recording on my laptop. My sound card? Well its ****. When I try to record I get a drop off and a nice loud click to go with it about every 2 seconds or so. Basically its useless at this point. After reading on the internet for about 5 hours and trouble shooting everything I could find, I am still at a loss at what to do. I believe the issue stems from a low buffer capacity on my computers built it sound card. Basically the cache gets filled and I end up losing that moment of sound that I keep missing.

So what is my question? Well would investing in a real preamp interface fix this issue or do I need to buy a new sound card? Do interfaces come with their own buffering abilities, or is that all going to be my sound cards responsibility? If I do need a new sound card, what should I buy to fix my problem? Replacing the internal is impossible as it is intergrated (yay laptops!) so what is there in the way of reliable external sound card set ups? Or I am completely left field in my reasoning?

My software of choice is Ableton Live 9 Studio and laptop is a Lenovo model from 2 years ago (I can't find the type of sound card it has in it, sorry)

Any suggestions for trouble shooting or advice on the hardware I need going forward?
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timmer1112 said:
Since you seem to be obsessing over my education and feel the need to be an idiot on the internet because no one will take you seriously in real life, my class was FREE. It was high school, I am an 18 year old aspiring musician, at some point in your depressed life you were probably in a very similar position. All my training in music has gone towards singing and classical music theory and musicology, so SORRY for asking a FORUM of musicians to help a brother out. One of the reasons I turned here so quickly was because "Banjo Mart" as you so affectionately want to call it wasn't a solid source of information. So why not try and learn from real musicians? People who will post legit help and answers and lead me to an understanding of something I know almost nothing about. People unlike you, who just feel the need to post mindless babble in order to talk down to the "noob" and feel all high and mighty about yourself. I guess a Napolean complex is in order, or maybe we should call it a Mozart Complex. He was pretty short right? Oh. But he had talent, didn't he?
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N00b just beat down c7sus. Nice work.
 
The store certainly weren't doing any favour with the Icicle.
You now have a nice mic and so will have saved for a reasonable interface.
You've come to the right place for help and humour which is occasionally balanced by a grinding axe or malcontent.
Good luck.
 
Oh Yeah!

Good tongue lashing Tim. You gonna fit in real nice around here! And there's some good advice here. You just gotta dig for it.
 
ecc83 said:
DO! Get an interface with MIDI ports.
Yes, many keyboards come equipped with USB but that just allows them to work on a computer, you still do not have a MIDI "interface". This last allows the connection of any other MIDI device, a drum machine, MIDI controller even a relatively cheap "Portasound" type keyboard which will nonetheless give you not only access to a vast variety of sounds but also allow you to learn the nuts&bolts of MIDI.

The addition of MIDI ports to an AI need not increase its cost, the Steinberg UR22 is a stonking little interface with MIDI but cost LESS than much of the MIDIless competition.

MIDI is a fantastic success story for industry co-operation, we lose its real functions at our peril and for a ha'poth of tar?

Dave.
Click to expand...

Hey! Why didn't I get an invite to this party...I missed all the fun!

Anyhow, a potential interface to add to your short list would be the M Audio M Track. I bought one a couple of months ago for a specific project--my main interface involved a huge mixer and it needed something more portable--and have been pleasantly surprised. Two mic/line/instrument inputs, phantom power, direct monitoring, pre amps nice and quiet even at high gain and the MIDI that ecc83 suggests and I agree with. I only cost me $139 down here in Aus so I suspect it'll be about 10 cents in the USA. Best around? Nope. Good enough to keep you going for a few years, absolutely.

Rod Norman said:
I'm not picking on you, but just pointing out a comparison. "Honey, I bought this nice cushion but now we're going to have to redecorate the whole house." You have one part of the equation; the mic. Your laptop is not up to the task. I have an ASUS i7 laptop that i paid $500 for and it is designed for audio, video, and animation. The i6's might be a bit iffy. Go online and check about whether the sound card is the real problem, but my guess is your laptop is just not made for recording. All the other advice is correct but if you are not using a powerful enough cpu, you will always have problems. I would look online for you but I don't know what your laptop specs are. You might try a site called gearslutz. It's a forum dealing with these issues.
Rod Norman
Engineer
Click to expand...

I suppose it COULD be you computer but I'd say this is highly unlikely. Simple recording--and your problems seem to be with only a track or two--doesn't take much processor power at all. I think it's much more likely that the Icicle forced you to use you onboard sound card for monitoring, which in turn forced you to run MME drivers which are at the mercy of everything else happening in Windows. Any decent USB interface will also have specialist ASIO drivers that bypass all the Windows rubbish.

That said, once you get going, your best to close anything unnecessary on your computer, particularly things like Wifi networking and anti virus software. Also turn off all system sounds (they're annoying anyway. Also, do a search for "optimising your computer for audio" (it'll depend on what Windows version you have) and follow the instructions there. It'll make a difference.

Finally, welcome to Home Recording and sorry you had a bit of a rough time. The trouble with asking questions is that, until you have the basic knowledge, you don't know what questions to ask. To take the supermarket analogy WAY too far, it's easy to ask "where's the grated horse radish" but much more difficult if you have to ask for "that white stuff that's kind of spicy and goes well with roast beef and in seafood cocktail sauce". And none of this is helped by the typical Guitar Centre sales person not know much more about audio than the person in the supermarket anyway!

...and I wish I COULD get grated horseradish. All I seem to be able to find is some creamed stuff that doesn't have nearly the same "punch".
 
"...and I wish I COULD get grated horseradish. All I seem to be able to find is some creamed stuff that doesn't have nearly the same "punch"."
Grow your own?

And I agree about computer grunt. I had (till son wrecked it) an HP 850 MEGA Hz processor laptop with 1/2G of ram and a 20G hard drive. It ran XP Pro and using an M-A fast track pro it would run 2 tracks of 24 bits 44kHz glitch free in Samplitude SE8 for as long as the hard drive would let me. The MIDI latency was not 1/2 bad either!

Dave.
 
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