Saturday 30 January 2016

Interface

I was sat at home last night watching the rain lash against the window when there was an unexpected knock on the front door. That's rarely good news, This time, however, it was a Brazilian delivery guy with my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 audio interface, It had been shipped all the way from Italy (for some reason) and arrived three days earlier than expected.



As usual with technological things, I was a bit nervous about setting it up. What if I couldn't get it to work? What if my laptop and/or Reaper stubbornly refused to acknowledge its existence? I'd have blown £130 on a pleasingly retro-looking box. In the event, of course, it was more or less plain sailing: download the drivers, alter Reaper's line in/line out settings (as instructed in the Focusrite manual) and away she goes.

Another thing that made me nervous about getting the interface was that it might highlight the shortcomings of my sound card in terms of latency - the annoying gap between making a sound and hearing it played back by the computer. I have no idea what type of sound card is on my laptop, but I'm willing to bet it's no better than "bog standard" - ie, not really up to the demands of home recording.

Fortunately, however, the Focusrite has a way round all that. It allows you to listen to both your performance and the pre-recorded tracks through it rather than your computer, thereby making sure everything is heard in real time (because you're not listening to your performance via your computer). That's actually quite a weight off my mind, as I was dreading having to get into the (expensive) mysteries of sound card upgrades.

So it's all good apart from one thing. I have a condenser mic, and now I have an audio interface for connecting the mic to my laptop. But what I don't have is a lead for connecting my mic to my interface. I NEED AN INTERFACE FOR MY INTERFACE. That's doubly annoying, because I certainly used to have the right sort of lead, and I never throw away leads or cables - as you would know if you'd seen me last night untangling the massive ball of cables I've had stashed in a bin bag for the last six years. But it simply wasn't there. I must've included it as part of the deal when I sold my old mic, which, in retrospect, was pretty stupid of me. So that's my task for today: trudging back to Music Express to buy a lead for the mic I bought there last weekend. I bet I don't see much change from £30, either.

2 comments:

  1. Oh excellent, I hope you manage to get a deal on the lead

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    1. It was "only" £13 in the end, so not a catastrophe.

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