A live rack and a recording rack are two very different animals, and to be perfectly honest only YOU can configure your own ideal rack because it has to suit the way you work.
A generic live rack might have the following:
3 - Stereo 31 band graphic EQs. ( For stereo mains and 4 stage monitor...
So right now he's getting click from the phones and vocals from the monitors? You could buy a cheap 4-8 channel mixer and let him control his own headphone mix.
Are your buffers set too small?
Is the ASIO driver the only available one?
Is it the latest version?
Is the latest version the most stable version?
Has it been installed and uninstalled repeatedly and/or PROPERLY ? There's a few files that your recording application might create that...
You mean the megaphone/telephone/hollow pipe sound?
Try using an eq to roll off the lows and highs and boost a narrow peak in the midrange, you might need to add some distortion to taste.
Crank the threshold right down, set the compression ratio to it's maximum, set the attack to the smallest/shortest setting and set the release to it's longest setting. Now play around with the attack time and see what happens.
Messing with extreme settings makes it easy to hear their affects.
You're right about seek times being relatively slow but the HD is gonna have to seek a new spot anyway since the audio and software will be in different places even if they are on the same partition, as a matter of fact having unfragmented audio in one spot should reduce the number of jumps...
I disagree, the sm57 is an excellent mic for micing guitar amps and it is also a decent vocal mic.
It is great on Snare drum, and good on toms and percussion instruments.
It will do a respectable job on just about anything you try it on, with a few exceptions .
Have a look at this package
http://www.m-audio.com/products/m-audio/omnistud.php
It comes in two flavours, the Delta 66 has a digital in/out and the Delta 44 doesn't.
P.S. You cant go wrong with an sm57.
Patchbays exist for the sole purpose of convenience, they are designed so that at the cost of a few extra feet of cable you don't have to go digging behind your rack every time you want to connect one thing to another.
Whether you need a patchbay or not depends entirely on your gear list, hookup...
From the Motherboard Monitor homepage:
I made a pretty silly error in the 5.3.5.0 mbm.dll for all VIA686 temp sensors, you will get totally wrong values, I have updated the full install to mbm 5.3.5.1.
http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
maybe that's why.
If you are using your PC's original soundcard and running straight into the mic input, that's your problem. You need to get a small mixer or external mic pre and run into the line input.
Like mixsit said, just take the direct out from the insert and send it to the compressor instead of the recorder, then send the compressor output to the recorder.