What do you use for RECORDING?

[ernstinen]

Matto is correct. Proper microphone pre-amp level is ESSENTIAL to getting a good vocal recording, as is proper use of compression/limiting.Ern

[53mph]

Mattos right.The people who sold you this monster should be helping you out. I often find support teams respond to email questions more than phone calls. Drop them an email with the most essential questions.Have you got the phantom power switched on. I know that my Edirol firewire card requires you to switch a button at the back to turn on the phantom power for the mic inputs. Without it you'll be gettinga very low signal input. One way to tell if this is the case. Do the wave forms on the computer screen look like big strong mountain ranges or little weak streams? If they're big strong mountain ranges then the input signal is not the problem.To eliminate another possible cause follow these instructions.On the PC go to the "Start" menu (the button that says Start at the bottom of the screen).On the drop down box select "Control Panel"In the control panel select "Sound and Audio" or whatever it's called because mine is in Italian.Check the Volume level is on max.In Audio check the playback and recording is going through your Mbox.In the playback part of "Audio" hit the "Volume" botton. A panel of audio faders will pop up. Make sure your "Wave" and "Master Volume" faders are on maxIn the "Recording" section of Audio hit the volume button and make sure the faders for line in and microphone are up high.This shouldn't be an issue as you should be able to do all this within ProTools but, as I said before, if there is a conflict with your internal soundcard (which I suspect there is because you said it was the only one that came up in the Audio properties of Pro Tool) you may need to do these things.Of course the best thing to do would be to disable the internal soundcard completely......but that's for another message.Look on the bright side of this. You've probably learned a lot about computers whilst sorting out these problems.

[ernstinen]

I agree that most manufacturers think that you SHOULD know everything that they already know, just by osmosis! Although I'm a recording engineer, it's taken me a LONG time to know what I know, and most of that is in the analog realm. I'm pretty slow learning digital technology. Maybe that's because I'm a full-time composer and don't have a "commercial" studio anymore.My biggest pet peeve is no written manual for learning software. Sure, there's a manual somewhere on your hard drive, but it doesn't make sense to go back and forth from a "soft" manual to the program you're trying to learn. I guess they expect you to print it out yourself if you want a written manual! Ern