Foolish me! Bought an almost up-to-date computer, a MacBook Air with M1 chip. Very nice except it cannot do the one thing I want it to do without an added bit of gear. Which is to record a mix — like every DJ wants to do. In the old Apple days you could use the headphone out as a line-in for recording. No longer. Another stupid Apple decision.
So I’m asking for recommendations on brand and model for an external USB audio interface. I have a standard RCA to 3.5 mm audio-out from my amp and the MacBook Air has USC-C/Thunderbolt 3 connections. I’m not looking for a high-end piece of gear, just functional and reliable — and I’m price sensitive.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
I was all set to record my Lee Scratch Perry Sonic Frolic Birthday Mix today — and now, if I’m to do it today, LSP’s birthday, I have to drag my antique old MacBook out, which works but is very, very slooooow and has crap interconnectivity with the net. Big pain, practically it means being back to sneaker net!
I use an SSL 2+ which I’m very happy with. Not used it to record a DJ mix yet as I only have one working 1210, but loving the sound quality. Around £250 I think.
Thanks to all for your input. Lots of good suggestions and I value your experience and wisdom. I’ve looked at everything suggested and still have one more avenue to explore. I will say that everything I’ve seen has one or another drawback whether it’s cost, features, clunkyness, imminent obsolescence or whatever. I’ll report back more fully in a few days when I find out whether my current direction works out or not. And also address what I have learned about the field in general and what’s available. I did it so you don’t have to!
Can you believe that 35 years ago I was at the cutting edge of digitizing audio? I did the very first consumer CD-ROM with about 600 sound samples from various records, all taken from vinyl! There was only one piece of digital gear available and no internet for endless research. I conjured up the production process by the seat of my pants. Before my bloody time! I enjoyed doing it tremendously - thought I was at the forefront of a brand new way of discovering music. The CD-ROM sold for I think it was $150 a piece and we sold all 1,000 copies. Came in a big box with a manual on how to use this new medium of multimedia interactivity, as it was then called with great hype.
Now, we have Spotify, which in its way is the result of those early days. For awhile in the late ‘90s I tentatively worked on an internet music service that I called SoundSwell that would have been Spotify with bells and whistles. Guess who is not much of a businessman!
I’m happy being old school, but I don’t like feeling like a dinosaur, which is somewhat how I feel with what’s going on with tech now. And, to give you all fair warning, the rate of change is projected to increase, i.e. more change faster. Get ready.
I’ve just got Ableton, which is nice, and I’m trying to find a way to transfer a few projects from Logic 10.4.8 to get to grips with it. I tend to do my edits using two bar or more loops, but in Logic they have gaps where no audio exists if that makes sense, see pic.
I need to export each audio track as a two bar loop including the silence but I’ll be buggered if I can find a way to do that.
If I understand correctly… I imagine the only way is to use the timeline bar and do it stem by stem. Or just loop everything up into continuous loops bounce it all and then jigsaw it back together in ableton using your visual.
Think you asked this a while ago but I’ve not been about. Go to “Export all tracks as audio files” and tick the options which mean the audio runs to the end of the project, rather than stops after the audio stops. If you see what I mean. You might need to drag the project end marker to the end of bar 2 too. It’s under export I think. This will export each track as a full 2 bar (or 4 bar or whatever) audio file all the same length.
