[brendan2003]

Hello all,
I play Irish music with a group located in Chicago, and I was trying to find a way to get some high quality audio into my 333 iMac and then burn it on a cd. I'm new at this, and don't really know how to go about this. Some one told me I need to get a mixing board or something and record it right at my computer. I have a Dynamic Microphone from Sony and put it in the audio in port and tried recording it with simple sound, but the audio was terrible and I would need more than one microphone recording at once. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

Brendan B.

[marusin]

A regular microphone will not work with your iMac by just plugging it in due to the "input" being a combo Apple Mic/Line-In (someone correct me if I'm wrong!)... An Apple Mic will extend further than a typical 1/8" microphone or line jack and makes a connection to a mic pre-amp that's built in... My only other suggestion is putting your microphone(s) and equipment into a pre-amp of some sort and then into your Mac (You won't get a high enough sound level into it otherwise)...

Once you have sound going in to the Mac, I would use Coaster (search http://www.versiontracker.com for it) to record the audio.. It will record the audio coming into the Line-In as one big .AIFF file. From there you can use a variety of editing programs (ProTools, Peak, etc) to mix the sound up... From there, once you are producing .AIFF files, you can burn a cd out of them by using a program such as Roxio Jam (my preference or even Roxio Toast)....

I know this is a broad overview, but the key is that a mic going into your mac won't work that great and that you should use a mixer of some sort to blend the signal and dump it in (unless you're going to be doing multi-track recording)...

-Mike