Forked Thread: How to connect computer to sound board?

[sien]

Forked from: How to connect computer to sound board?

Originally Posted by stew1104

i am very interested in starting up a tape ministry at our church and was wondering if i could get some help on connecting my laptop to the sound board, and also can i use media player or do i need to purchase a different software program.

What sort of sound board do you have? Brand and model?

[bcastle]

we've got a yamaha mg/32 that's hooked up to the board. i cant seem to record well on to the computer yet. our computer is an older hp pavilion media center and we have sony acid which will record, but its crappy at best. we just use a stand alone cd player/recorder for our sermons from the cd out on the board

[pdc]

Any audio console with a matrix out, aux out, etc can send audio to a computer. If you are coming balanced/+4 out of the console, you will need a DI or dedicated computer audio interface to unbalanced/-10. If you have an unbalanced/-10 output on your console, you only need cables to take you from 1/4" phone plugs to 3.5mm for your computer's input. There are plenty of premade cables on sale at your local music store. Just go in and tell them what you want to do.

As far as software is concerned, you can record on Audacity and other freeware. If you belly up a few bucks you can get into more complicated and more functional software.

The thing to know is that you will not likely get levels you are happy with, without compression and limiting. To get the best level, you will need some type of a limiter before the computer. Doing the limiting in the computer software is not the same thing. The limiting will bring the average levels closer to the peak levels, increasing volume, and setting the maximum volume so that you have no clipping and "overs".

The other thing is that, you may not need much gain and may have drastic EQ for your house sound system, and find that your mic sounds terrible and needs more gain for the recording. So, you might think about taking a direct out of the one channel you are recording, and running that to an adjacent channel's line input, making sure it is unassigned to a house or monitor mix buss. Then you can add or decrease gain and adjust the EQ on that channel strip, affecting the recording alone.