[Ti] Pet Shop Boys + Powerbook

[Victor Eijkhout]

At 15:49 -0600 2004/07/11, cheshirekat wrote:
>I would like to be able to have 1 or 2 midi instruments, and a microphone
>connected to my PowerBook. I'd like for the sound of the instruments and
>microphone to go out to speakers and recorded to an external FireWire
>hard drive simultaneously so I can later burn them to CDs.

Maybe not on your $200 budget, but in principle it's quite simple 
what you want.

You probably want a host program such as Logic (Express will do fine 
for you) to record both audio and midi and to be able to edit it. 
There are other hosts, but unfortunately not as many for the Mac as 
for PC. Count on $200-300 or so. Take a look at ProTools Free. It's 
free, but I'm not sure what it all does. Its midi editing seems to be 
its weak part.

A midi interface is cheap. $100 should give you more channels than you need.

For the microphone and maybe guitars and such you need an audio 
interface, again $200-300. Look at Emagic's A62 and A26, MBox, and 
various other brands such as M-Audio. If you find the right box it 
may even have enough midi channels that you don't need a separate 
interface.

So, actually with $200-300 (ProTools Free + an interface) you might 
actually do the whole thing. Let me put in a plug for my favourite 
retailer, SweetWater Sound. Just call them and ask for advice. I 
really like that they treat you nice even if you spend only a couple 
of pennies.
-- 
Victor Eijkhout <eijkhout at cs.utk.edu>, 329 Claxton, Comp Sci, UT, 
Knoxville TN 37996.
tel: 865 974 9308 (W), 865 673 6998 (H), 865 974 8296 (F)
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~eijkhout/