[RockingDad]

Hi all,

I've got a laptop at home not being used which i'm going to use for the sole purpose of a home studio. It has firewire and usb 2.0 as well as onboard mic and line in ports.

Now the thing is I don't want to spend a fortune for my first dip in the world of home studio. I've tried recording my guitar with the desktop pc with some quite poor efforts. I've used a cable i got off ebay with a mono jack one end and a mono pc soundcard jack the other but didn't really seem to work very well.

I've got a cheap mic and tried plugging that in as well but the recording it so quiet it's useless.

My amp has a line out socket as well.

So what is the best way?

I'm using Audacity at the moment (or would do if I can get some sound into it) as it seems the easiest although I do have cubase.

Cheers

Mark

[Lcjones]

Lets get specific...

Sounds like we need some basic troubleshooting

Model # Of Laptop:
Manufacturer:
Operating System & Service Pack Level:
Audio Drivers:
Do you have the original system disc's and drivers?

Does the laptop have a CD player? Does it play a CD? If the speakers aren't working or you hear no sound from speakers, do headphones work? If it's Window$, do you hear system sounds?

Les

[OldG]

Hey Frank,

If you refer to the diagram I posted and change step 3 to 'click the playback button' then go to step 4 (making sure to click 'ok' when you've done this) finish with step 5 and you should be able to hear yourself.

I was assuming you were playing into a recording program - but if you just want to hear yourself then you gotta tell windows to use the line in for playback and recording. I have my playback switched off as my recording software lets me monitor through its recording channel, it sounds like Windows sound recorder doesn't...

for free recording software a lot of people use Audacity or Kristal to record with very impressive results.. make sure to use ASIO4ALL to get rid of latency (playback will be out of sync with your picking)

regards

Mick