Mixing Down to Hard Drive Help?

[Andy R]

I have an anaogue facility at home and want to incorporate a card into my setup to record tracks direct to disk on my pc.
There are many cards with analogue outputs in various numbers but can I mix down directly to the same hard drive? How is this possible? If a card has say 8 analogue outputs can I mix down more than 8 digital tracks? Is this done by assigning multiple tracks to the same output?

[Slackmaster2K]

Not sure I understand what you're saying but...

You need multitracking software to do the actual recording. With a gadgetlabs, lynxone, etc card you can record from, say, 8 different sources at once in your multitracking software. And I assume you mean "inputs" and not "outputs" when you're talking about soundcard specs. The number of tracks you can record simultaneously will depend on the number of INPUTS on the card, not OUTPUTS.

Anyway, to get your feet wet check out www.fasoft.com and download n-Track studio.

Slackmaster 2000

[Andy R]

Thanks for reply. Didn't make myself clear.
Sound card has say 8 inputs and outputs so i can record 8 tracks at a time. How many tracks can I then play back at a time? Let's say I record 3 passes of 8. Can I then play back the 24 tracks routed to the 8 outputs?
If I need a 2 track mixdown how does one mix down directly to the hard drive? Hope that's clearer. Thatnks for url. Will check out.

[Eddie N]

you can playback as many tracks as your computer can handle , be it 10 or 100.. and yes , you can route them all to your soundcards outputs..

as far as "mixing to the hard drive" its not as complex as you think.. you select something like "save as mixed wave file" in your multitrack program , and it renders the file for you..

- eddie -

[Andy R]

Eddie,
Thanks, that's what I needed to know.