This year, Miranda wanted a recording studio for Christmas. That may sound a little more pie in the sky than it really is. What she really wanted was a better way to record her music, typically, her voice and guitar, so that she could more easily share her music with friends and perhaps sell a little bit of it on Snocap.

For those of you who don’t know about Snocap, it is a site where emerging artists can upload their music and then sell it via social networking sites. I learned about Snocap from Maura Kennedy at a panel at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. Maura sells some of her songs on Snocap.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about this until it was too late to thoroughly investigate the best solutions and then purchase them. She has been quick to note that I can still find other opportunities to get her better recording equipment, so I’m using this blog post as my first explorations into building a PC based recording studio.

The first thing that is necessary is a better microphone. The built in mics on PCs just don’t cut it, nor do most of the small mics you can buy and plug into the 3.5 mm jack on the site of the computer. I’ve spent a bit of time investigating microphones. The first thing to look at is whether you want a dynamic microphone or a condenser microphone. A great summary of the differences can be found in this article.

Based on this, and other reading, it seems like the best microphone for Miranda, at least right now is the Shure SM58. The problem is that this microphone, like most of the other really good microphones aren’t set up to connect directly to a PC. Instead of the small 3.5 mm microphone jack, they use an XLR cable.

However, there are a few interesting XLR to USB cables that I’ve been looking into. The cable that seems to be getting the best reviews is the LightSnake USB Microphone cable. Essentially, it is a soundcard in a cable. You plug the USB plug into your computer and the microphone into the XLR connection, and you have a new sound device that you can record with. One problem is that this cable only seems to work with dynamic mics. This is probably fine for Miranda getting going, but when building out a PC based recording studio, you might want to have some condenser mics as well.

It seems like there are two options that people talk about for XLR to USB converters that supply phantom power to condenser mics. The first is the Blue Microphones Icicle XLR Cable to USB Conversion Adapter. The second is the MXL USB Mic Mate . These seem pretty similar. The Blue Icicle seemed to get better buzz on various forums, but Amazon sells more of the MXL USB Mic Mates. I haven’t had a chance to play with either, so I don’t have an opinion.

For Miranda’s electric guitar, Lightsnake makes a USB Instrument cable. She could plug her guitar into this cable and then into the computer.

Once all of these devices are connected, how do you record? The simplest is probably to use audacity. Audacity is a ‘free cross-platform sound editor’. I use it to record and edit sound on my PCs. However, Audacity doesn’t seem to have a nice way of recording multiple tracks at the same time, so Miranda would need to mix the audio inputs outside of audacity. Depending on how Windows is set up, you can probably do this with the sound control for windows.

The next step up the ladder is probably n-track studio. This allows you to record multiple tracks at the same time, set levels for each track, and mix them appropriately. It is shareware, but the full version is only $64. I’ve started testing it, but without any good audio devices to play with my tests are a bit limited.

The Lightsnake cable also comes with 30 day trials of various Sony programs for recording, but the full version of these programs cost $300 or more and probably aren’t necessary for the first phase of a PC based recording studio.

Part of the reason I dug into this is that I’d like to play with some of these myself for podcast. In addition, when I’ve covered political events there have often been XLR boxes that I suspect I could tap into with my laptop, if I had a good XLR USB connector.

With all of this, the question then becomes, could I connect multiple XLR to USB connectors to a PC to be able to record many tracks? How many connectors would a PC support? It seems like this depends on the USB hubs you get, how many USB controllers you have, and whether you want the USB devices to be powered or not.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to test some of this and perhaps both Miranda and I can end up with professional quality recording capabilities on our PCs. I realize this is all PC centric and Mac owners might be saying, hey, we can do all of this sort of stuff much easier on a Mac. I don’t have any Macs, so that isn’t an option for us.

However, I would love to hear any experiences that any of you have had, especially in terms of hooking up XLR audio equipment to PCs.