New Audio Editing Suite

Now that I've researched the necessary hardware for recording digital audio I can turn to studio hardware and software. Not having much experience with audio I turned to my good friend Kam Abbott (audio engineer for CIB Radio), he gave me advice for building the following system.

I started with software, which had to be easy to use and Mac compatible. My colleague Scott Watts (Media Specialist at BCIT) suggested the free cross platform audio editing software Audacity from sourceforge.net. Apple has two audio editing software packages GarageBand and Logic but both applications centre around music production instead of simple audio editing. For those that are a bit more flush there is the high-end DigiDesign ProTools LE Software and Digi 002 Rack. This solution is more powerful than the others and is rack-mountable but is very complex and costly. In the end we went with the open source choice, it seems relatively simple and is free.

The G5 PowerMac that we purchased for the suite has a line in, line out, headphone, optical (toslink) in and out ports but doesn't have any balance audio XLR microphone inputs. We are going to use two studio microphones with XLR connections so we needed to come up with a solution. The various external audio hardware products (using either Firewire or USB) would give us more inputs and outputs. But I like the idea of using a simple mixing board such as the Behringer Eurorack UB1202 which allows us to connect our various audio devices and control them before they go into the computer via a stereo TSR 3.5mm mini style cable.

We purchased two sets of microphones; one set for field recording (the robust dynamic mic: Shure sm58) and one set for the studio (the very good quality but remarkably affordable ribbon mic Studio Projects C1.) I was told a good microphone isn't enough for good voice recordings so we purchased two microphone voice processors (Symetrix 528E.)

For monitoring the sound we have 2 pairs Beyerdynamic DT 231 studio headphones (very affordable, nice sound quality and very robust) and a pair of Tannoy Reveal passive studio speakers powered by a Tascam PA-30 stereo amplifier.

The audio editing room is not totally sound proof so it limits it's capabilities as a recording studio but it should suffice for voice-overs and mock radio ads.

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