Help with basic questions..

[Elijscott]

Hello,
I'm pretty new to this.. and here's my situation: We want to record basic demos (live) for our band, and we also want to leave room to expand our system in the future. We are a little confused as to what some of the i/o definitions are, but we are starting to grasp most of it. Basically, we have a standard pc, and an analog mixerboard that has only mic and 1/4 outputs. (It's old) .. and cakewalk home studio. We are trying to figure the best options for buying at this point.. We have looked at most everything, and basically decided that the best option is the m-box. However, we don't know how much capacity that leaves us for expanding. Basically, if I understand it correctly, since the mixer isn't digital, then the 2 mic inputs coming off the soundboard will go into the box, giving us a rough mix of all of our tracks combined off the board into only 1 track into the computer. The only mixing controls (and this part is mainly for drums, obviously the guitar and bass would generally be 1-2 tracks at a time) that we would have would be before the recording, basically.. (this is my dense understanding at this point). How can we record more (8-12, hopefully) tracks simulataneously and individually with an analog mixer and a pc? What are the shortcuts, etc. I know these are dumb questions.. but you have to start somewhere. The problem we're faced with is that we are working on a serious budget, because we just really want to use this as a tool to hear, re-write, and hopefully improve our songs before we go into the pre-production bit with a producer and a "real" studio. Our last Cd turned out pretty good, but if we had spent more time listening to the songs, they would have been better. Obviously. Anyway.. thanks to anyone who answers.. if you would rather email it, just send it to Elijscott@bellsouth.net
Thanks!

[mshilarious]

I'm not sure why you want the Mbox if you already have a mixer. Your mixer has preamps, and if you want more inputs to your PC, why not get a 1010lt or something which is cheaper?

Does your mixer have channel inserts? That's how you get more than two channels out.

[Elijscott]

Right, and it does have preamp outs, and the problem that we ran into is that the individual channel outs on the board are 1/4", and all of the interfaces we've looked at have 1 or 2 1/4" inputs and a boatload of rca inputs. According to my impression, the rca's are for digital audio inputs.. which we obviously don't have with the analog mixer. If I'm wrong, and if there's an easy way to get more channels in, then we definitely would opt for the cheaper option. Thanks for your quick response.

[AlChuck]

Anything with RCA jacks for digital i/o would be using S/PDIF, so there would typically be only be a pair of those on most cards. So anything with "boatloads of RCA" jacks must be uisng most of them for analog i/o.

[Elijscott]

Ok, that makes sense. So, coming off the board is 1/4" outputs. Is there a simple way to convert from 1/4" to rca? If there is, then that could be our solution.

[Bulls Hit]

Sure, just get a 1/4" to rca converter cable