Audacity Forum

He has one. The adapter they sold me was Hosa Technology, TrackLink Microphone to USB Interface, XLR3F to USB Type A That can work. Let me go back and figure out why your original configuration failed. Why do you already have a Shure SM58? That's a very rock band microphone, not a casual purchase. Y...

A virtual or physical cable to plug only the song into the mic input would seem to be a much better theoretical solution. No, not really. Then the far end will not be able to hear you speak and they will not be able to hear guests. The broadcasting people have solved this for decades with Mix-Minus...

And one other quick note. Your first experiences with the microphone cable were completely bogus. I'm betting you were recording your laptop built-in microphone rather than your SM58. You do have a laptop, right? We never established that.

Koz

But this room is far from bare, darn full! I found by accident that my overly stuffed garage is not dreadful for recording sound. There are no plain bare walls, irregular boxes everywhere and I can put furniture moving pads on the floor. I know you fell instantly in love with fancy equipment, but y...

I found my Shure X2U pix. http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/x2uShureOverdub.jpg That's misleading because all I did was jam the SM58 into the X2U. You can put a nice XLR cable between the two and that cable can be very long. http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/XLR-Cable-500.jpg http://www.sweetw...

Photography is half about cameras and half about seeing the world that's around you. Recording is all about hearing the sounds and noises that surround you all day — and trying not to record them. This American Life radio show gets good field recordings and interviews under some extreme conditions b...

Near as I can tell, the only problem with the Podcaster isn't the microphone. It's USB service, which means the farthest you can get away from your noisy computer is 6 feet. Once you get past the microphone quality problems, the room/environment comes up immediately. You can't record in a bare room....

I found my example of Frying Mosquitoes. Turn it up a little after I stop talking. http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/FryingMosquitoes3.wav That's a cheap, inexpensive ICUSBAUDIO adapter, and it doesn't do that with every computer. That's very difficult to get rid of in post production filtering. ...

Low end microphone adapters are not without their problems. Most of them have low volume (I have a Shure X2U) and some of them have digital noise. That's our "frying mosquitoes" problem several people have complained about. The X2U is lovely, but I have never used it at anything but full u...

You may have the wrong adapter cable. The quiet noise is much too high and your voice is much too low. I'm betting they sold you a straight XLR to stereo 1/8" adapter cable (attached-bottom). It's a lovely cable and very common, but completely wrong for a soundcard. The real adapter cable has o...