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If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. Ardour works fine with an Aud

If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. Ardour works fine with an Audio Technica AT2100 USB (I tried it and can verify that it uses the standard USB host drivers without complaint) for both I/O and works out-of-the-box with most of my audio interfaces and an XLR mic.

CharlesW 8y ago
> If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. My 2¢: Based on my experience with podcasters, I wouldn't recommend a Snowball for beginners doing spoken-word recordings. This is a "worse is better" scenario where a cheap dynamic will give you better out-of-the-box results than a condenser mic like the Snowball, in part because it forces speakers to get closer to the mic (increasing the ratio of signal to ambient noise), and in part because dynamics usually can't record anything over ~15 kHz (spoken word tops out around 8 kHz). A Snowball is fine for folks savvy enough to use an EQ to roll off everything over, say, 10 kHz during production.
- eropple 8y ago
  I wouldn't recommend one either, to be clear. ;) My recommendation for a podcaster is either the AT2005USB or ATR2100USB, which are both decent-quality cheap dynamic microphones that have a USB sound card inside of them for easier real-time monitoring (but can both be used as XLR mics later if you expand). What I meant was that Blue is positioning it as that entry level podcast microphone. Which is, in its way, weird; it's a really strange microphone to try to work with and it just looks silly. I alternate between an sE V7 dynamic, a Blue Encore 200 "active dynamic", and an AT2035 at my desk for recordings. The Blue is something I'm just testing but the other two microphones are great for different things. (Anyone who hasn't checked out a sE V7 should; for my money it's the best thing in the "SM58 range" of dynamics, with a really clear sound for a dynamic. And the damned thing won't roll off your desk if you have it handheld...)

CharlesW 8y ago

> If you're a musician, I'm pretty surprised you're using a USB mic. Particularly a Snowball--it's designed mostly for spoken-word. My 2¢: Based on my experience with podcasters, I wouldn't recommend a Snowball for beginners doing spoken-word recordings. This is a "worse is better" scenario where a cheap dynamic will give you better out-of-the-box results than a condenser mic like the Snowball, in part because it forces speakers to get closer to the mic (increasing the ratio of signal to ambient noise), and in part because dynamics usually can't record anything over ~15 kHz (spoken word tops out around 8 kHz). A Snowball is fine for folks savvy enough to use an EQ to roll off everything over, say, 10 kHz during production.

eropple 8y ago
I wouldn't recommend one either, to be clear. ;) My recommendation for a podcaster is either the AT2005USB or ATR2100USB, which are both decent-quality cheap dynamic microphones that have a USB sound card inside of them for easier real-time monitoring (but can both be used as XLR mics later if you expand). What I meant was that Blue is positioning it as that entry level podcast microphone. Which is, in its way, weird; it's a really strange microphone to try to work with and it just looks silly. I alternate between an sE V7 dynamic, a Blue Encore 200 "active dynamic", and an AT2035 at my desk for recordings. The Blue is something I'm just testing but the other two microphones are great for different things. (Anyone who hasn't checked out a sE V7 should; for my money it's the best thing in the "SM58 range" of dynamics, with a really clear sound for a dynamic. And the damned thing won't roll off your desk if you have it handheld...)