Supernaut

Recording A Live Show

Hello All

We have a couple live shows coming up I'd like to capture on my PowerBook with Cubase. I've always done it with a DAT, 4-track or tape deck since they are very much "fire and forget" interfaces, meaning, I can hit record and forget about them, except to flip the tape.

Any suggestions for capturing with software? How many minutes of continuous music can a PowerBook running Cubase capture? I can't really babysit and run the recording, I'll be too busy playing guitar and singing. I have a friend who can man the controls for me if necessary.

How does everyone pull this off? Bring in the 1-hour show as one big sound file and split it up later on? Grab 2-3 songs at a time?? The ideal situation would be to hit record and then stop it at show's end and sort it out later.

Suggestions very much appreciated.

Thanks - JB

Does Deck Or Deck Le Understand Adat

Hello All

This may be a silly question but I'm new to this on a Mac: does anyone know if Deck or Deck LE (from BIAS) understands ADAT? Can I pull in all 8 tracks from an ADAT via the light pipe with Deck? I couldn't find any info on their website.

Thanks - JB

Latency With The M-audio 1814 Or Motu 828mkii

Hello All

I've been doing PC recording using Linux in my home studio for a while now. Great sound, but I've had it with the latency. I've bought a G4 PowerBook (which is frickin' glorious btw) and I am evaluating the FireWire interfaces.

I need at *least* 5 input channels, so both the M-Audio 1814 and the MoTU 828mkII fit the bill perfectly. My question is, does anyone have any experience with these devices doing tracking and overdubbing in a studio setting? Let me explain my problem and what I want to achieve:

We are basically a hard rock and heavy metal band. We usually record the drums first, then the bass (1 or 2 tracks), then 2 rhythm guitar tracks, then leads and vocals. Usually, by the time I get to the leads, I have latency issues. I'll be playing back the recorded tracks, recording the lead in real time, and then when I play it all back I end up having to manually shift the lead and/or vocal tracks (and sometimes the other tracks) to the left to make up for the latency.

I've had it, I can't take it any more. I know some latency is unavoidable - how is it with these firewire interfaces? Any experiences? I've also recorded a lot to an ADAT and, while this mostly solves the latency issues, you only get 8 tracks and I *HATE* mucking around with tapes.

Note that I have very little use for post-processing (besides inter-track silliness ;-), nor is there much going on in the way of effects after the amps, no midi, etc., yet - I'm only interested in capturing live instruments for tracking. Perhaps there's a way to apply some sort of sync track to each individual track as in video engineering? Do some of the upper-level software packages have ways to accomodate this latency?

Suggestions welcome - both the 1814 and the 828mkII are in the price range I'm willing to spend.

Thanks in advance!

JB