Question concerning number of inputs in a souncard

[badgerer]

Hi,

As I understand it, a soundcard has a limited number of inputs. Now, if you place a mixer between the soundcard and mics, say the mixer has 4 inputs. Is it possible to then have 4 inputs running at once? I've just had a thought that probably you have cable running from each input in the soundcard to the input in the mixer, would I be right in thinking this? Therefore because you only have 2 cables running from inputs in the soundcard to inputs in the mixer, you can only use those 2 inputs to record? Is this correct? I'm getting myself very very

Thanks very much in advance for your help, I really feel I'm getting somewhere after about two weeks of solid research and decisions what to get for my little set up!

 

[moskus]

Yes. This is basically what a mixer to: Combine several inputs to a stereo output.

But remeber if you do this, you can't seperate the 4 original inputs later. If you want one track for each input, you need a soundcard with more than 2 inputs. I use the Audiotrak INCA88 and I'm very happy with it. It has 8 ins/ and 8 outs.

 

[Track Rat]

If you have, say, a sound card and it has two analog inputs. Now you take a mixer that has 8 inputs. You patch the left and right output of that mixer to the left and right input of the sound card. Now you can do one of two things with it set up like this. First is you could mix what ever you have going into the 8 inputs of the mixer together, pan them, whatever and that records to two tracks in the computer as a stereo pair.
Or you could pan one or more of the channels hard to one side and pan the rest the other way. This way you could have 4 or 5 mics on a drum kit mixed together and panned one way and bass or whatever panned the other and each recorded on a seperate track. Then you could fill in whatever else you wanted to add, one to two tracks at a time.
If you want to do simultainious multitrack recording where something like a drum kit could be recorded with individual drums are tight miced and recorded on their own tracks, you'd need a sound card with as many inputs as you needed simultainious tracks (4, 8, 16, 24, etc).

 

[badgerer]

Ok, i think I understand. In a 2 input soundcard (I'm going to buy the Audiophile 2496) you have two stereo channels, i.e. one corresponds to the left, and the other to the right. So you've got two options:

- Use the soundcard as a multi track recorder (but only with two inputs obviously)
- You get your 4 tracks or however many tracks your mixer can handle and have it come out the other end (in your comp) as one stereo track. This means you can alter EQ settings and whatnot with your mixer for each individual channel before you record, but not obviously after, as the 4 tracks (or whatever) have been turned into one?

Thanks for the quick replies guys!