USB Audio – An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Last night I cleared off a desk to hook up my Belkin TuneStudio mixer to my laptop PC for podcasting. I plugged in the power, microphone, and headphones but I couldn’t find an audio output on the mixer. Crud! Well, the mixer is primarily designed to record directly on to an iPod so it’s possible that it didn’t have traditional RCA or XLR jacks for analog audio output. Not being one to give up that easily, I turned to Google and YouTube. Sure enough I found a video on YouTube that was a product demo from a trade show. The guy on the video mentioned a USB audio jack for input/output.
Could it be that simple? I fired up Audacity on the PC, plugged in a USB cable, and Windows recognized the new device. When I pressed the “record” button and started speaking into the mic I was pleasantly surprised to see a waveform appear on the timeline. What I wasn’t expecting was what happened when I stopped it and pressed “play”–the playback came not through the PC speakers but back through the USB and out the headphones that were plugged into the mixer. Way cool! I then experimented trying to induce feedback or an echo by recording and playing at the same time. Everything worked as it should. There was no need to turn down an input from the PC when recording a new track. Intelligence in audio recording–who would have thought…?
Dave