Ableton Forum

Hello all,

I received a Blue Snowball USB mic (please reserve your criticisms, I know this isn't exactly quality, budget was the main factor here) for Christmas this year intending to use it to start practicing home recording, mostly covers and scratch tracks for original material.

So anyways, when I plugged it in and prepared to record, I noticed the red recording dot was greyed out/white-ish and it wasn't reacting to my talking/tapping. After, messing with some settings, various google searches, making sure Ableton was recognizing it and it was selected in the input options, I finally got it to work by going the in the Audio Preferences>Hardware Setup and switched from my Realtek Audio to the Snowglobe.

SO! My question is will I have to contasntly switch back and forth between hardware settings in order to use this mic in Ableton? Because if that's, the case I cant hear the metronome or rhythm tracks/drums and that's obviously a major issue.

Also, I've considered reverting to using Audacity for recording, especially guitar covers. Will I run into a similar issues or is that actually a better route to go for just some raw recordings?

Eventually I'll attempt to use it for environment recording, live sampling, percussive sampling etc. But that's for future endeavors and not related to now.

Thanks Ableton community!! Hope to be posting and becoming more involved in this community in this new year!

USB microhpones are not a good solution because of this (having to select them as audio interface), they are better for podcasts and radio. My advice would be to exchange it for a normal microphone (the Blue Spark) and get a proper audio interface (UR12 by Steinberg starts at 99 USD) with microphone preamps. Proper audio interfaces have better driver (better performance and stability), better preamps (capturing better sound from the microphone) and you can adjust gain, they also integrate better with audio software as Live.

Blue microphones are excellent for their price you just choose not the best for the application.

Other not optimal solution is to download the ASIO4ALL driver which agregates all audio devices on the computer.

yes live needs to support 2 or more audio interfaces

I've used one myself, a Phillips speechmike. It's USB with other buttons on it for memos and dictation which you can map to controls in Ableton. It was tricky to get it working with my laptop soundcard but I did it using jackaudio (google it) and asio4all. This is windows though, if you use mac there's probably another way. So it's possible

slatepipe wrote:I've used one myself, a Phillips speechmike. It's USB with other buttons on it for memos and dictation which you can map to controls in Ableton. It was tricky to get it working with my laptop soundcard but I did it using jackaudio (google it) and asio4all. This is windows though, if you use mac there's probably another way. So it's possible

I'll look into that thanks! I am on Windows too so that works. Asio has always acted funny for me. Especially with my Maschine so we'll see how it goes.

I do need a proper audio interface though so at this point I might as well throw a cheap DI mic into that bundle as well.