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[salty09]

first let me introduce myself. my name is salt, I am from st louis mo. I am a 30 year old cs
major.I have been recording on a tascam porta 07 for about the last 5 or 6 years. recently it
blew up. being afraid of the amount of distraction I would have using my comp to record I
aquired a second 4 track tape machine( when I get on the comp to get something done I end
up miles away from where I need to be). Well now I am curios if there would be away to use
my comp for signal processing such as compression running it through my 4 tracks effects
loop. Im not really sure what is invovled to do this seeing as all I have learned so far in cs is
c++ and I dont think that would help here. I am not concerned as much with the best quality
as I am with just getting my ideas on to tape. There fore I am not really wanting to go out and
buy a bunch of extra stuff. I have acess to a bunch of music software all though I have never
used any of it or really have any idea what does what. I have a sound blaster live mp3 card. I
am sure this is not a very high quality card for this but once again I am not too worried about
perfect sound after all I did just buy another analog 4 track and did much of my recording
before running direct. I also update alot of comps for guys whee I work so I was wondering
what the very least mhz processor I would need to do this with. I would like to be able to have
a seperate comp for this project if possible. Well I appoligize in advance if my lack of
knowledge on this subject is tiresome and I thank you for any help you may have. oh yeah
and I am sorry if there are words miss spelt but I tried to post this message a minute ago and
netscape crashed and I have had to retype the whole thing and refuse to do so again. once again thx.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

No this isn't really possible, even with ASIO drivers there is a very noticable delay when you're doing live input processing....around 30-40ms or more depending on a lot of variables.

I would suggest losing the 4 track and having a run at recording on your computer, if it's up to the task. There are many cost benefits to tracking and mixing on a PC, the biggest being effects plugins (DirectX, VST).

You are very new to this so I'll stop here and just give you a link:

http://www.fasoft.com

Good luck.

P.S. the SB Live! is a common entry level card that will produce decent demo quality sound.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[AlChuck]

Wow, I could swear that I posted an answer to you yesterday...

Slackmaster's mostly got it right there, but I wanted to point out the crux of the matter a little more clearly: no matter how fast the computer is, no matter how capable the OS and the drivers, any software solution (plug-in or whatever) can only work on a digital audio data stream -- sound that has already been digitized. When recording in real-time, if you slam your soundcard's ADC with levels that are too hot, the signal will clip and give you ugly digital distortion. Nothing on the computer's side of the ADC converter can prevent that or give you any kind of limiting on the input to the ADCs. That part of the equation is outside of the computer's power to do anything about.

 

[salty09]

Yeha sorry about the double post but I posted it on the other forum then noticed that this was probably a more apropriate place for the question. Yeah I figured that it was a long shot but thought I would ask anyways. Thx for the responses. I might still go ahead and build the extra comp and use it to mix down to instaed of the tape deck I usually use to send my mix too. that way it will be changed to digital. Can I then send that to any kind of prgram and maybe add more to the final mix. I just started messing with acid and was wondering if thee is a way I can use my 4 track to record a simple guitar track and then create drums through acid to fit the song with a little more complexity then a normal drum machine would have. I have found it hard in the past to create drums for songs I wrote on the guitar so I ended up writting drum tracks then creating a song around the drums. Oh well once again thx alot for the advice.