As I've been reading the various posts and subjects in this forum I have been unable to find anything that remotely relates to my situation. I do not "create" music I simply record it. My needs are relatively simple but I've been unable to find Mac OSX software to run on my MacBook Pro that will do what I want to do smoothly.
My church records their service for putting out on our church website as well as making cassette recordings for some prisoners that we minister to. We are using a Firepod to isolate the various mics and have a total of 8 tracks that we are trying to keep unique so we can increase/decrease gain, silence, balance, and then make a master mp3 file that can be put on the website and recorded onto cassette (not CD - the prisoners can't have a CD player in the prison where we have contact).
Those 8 tracks are: (though I guess it's not that important that you know this but here they are anyway)
1. pastor
2. piano
3. flute
4. guitar
5. keyboard
6. organ
7. mic for picking up the congregation singing
8. all other mics coming through the mixer
In GarageBand I may need to increase the volume of one of the mics because of it being too low. I can increase the volume control but only to a certain point beyond which I just can't make it go higher. Because the Firepod is feeding into my MacBook Pro at a constant level (based on the gain set on its controls) there may still be sound coming from one or more of the mics when all I want to do is capture one mic for a segment of the total time. But trying to edit the sound level down to nothing is a real hassle. Obviously I could cut out sections but I also need to worry about keeping the tracks in sync with one another.
So, my question is this: Is GarageBand able to increase gain beyond the "track Volume" maximum? Would there be a better multi-track program that would allow me to do more sophisticated editing (such as what you might find in Sound Studio or Amadeus)? CuBase LE came with the Firepod but I found it to be difficult to use as well. Most everything seems geared toward creating music from loops mixed with real instruments. I don't particularly need to worry about beats or transposing or shifting instrument sounds to make a flute sound like an oboe.
Previously when I was only able to record the service on a single track we had to try to keep the mix balanced between the "house" and the recorder. Sometimes that was diametrically opposed to one another. Also, when I do a mixdown from the multi-track file I find that the music portion is always a huge jump in the sound wave over the speaking part of the recording. I've tried "normalizing" but that has never yielded good results. So, when I take the mixdown recording and then try to isolate the music part of the file to decrease the gain, you can always tell where the gain reduction is performed. It's a problem.
Thanks for any direction you might give to me.
My church records their service for putting out on our church website as well as making cassette recordings for some prisoners that we minister to. We are using a Firepod to isolate the various mics and have a total of 8 tracks that we are trying to keep unique so we can increase/decrease gain, silence, balance, and then make a master mp3 file that can be put on the website and recorded onto cassette (not CD - the prisoners can't have a CD player in the prison where we have contact).
Those 8 tracks are: (though I guess it's not that important that you know this but here they are anyway)
1. pastor
2. piano
3. flute
4. guitar
5. keyboard
6. organ
7. mic for picking up the congregation singing
8. all other mics coming through the mixer
In GarageBand I may need to increase the volume of one of the mics because of it being too low. I can increase the volume control but only to a certain point beyond which I just can't make it go higher. Because the Firepod is feeding into my MacBook Pro at a constant level (based on the gain set on its controls) there may still be sound coming from one or more of the mics when all I want to do is capture one mic for a segment of the total time. But trying to edit the sound level down to nothing is a real hassle. Obviously I could cut out sections but I also need to worry about keeping the tracks in sync with one another.
So, my question is this: Is GarageBand able to increase gain beyond the "track Volume" maximum? Would there be a better multi-track program that would allow me to do more sophisticated editing (such as what you might find in Sound Studio or Amadeus)? CuBase LE came with the Firepod but I found it to be difficult to use as well. Most everything seems geared toward creating music from loops mixed with real instruments. I don't particularly need to worry about beats or transposing or shifting instrument sounds to make a flute sound like an oboe.
Previously when I was only able to record the service on a single track we had to try to keep the mix balanced between the "house" and the recorder. Sometimes that was diametrically opposed to one another. Also, when I do a mixdown from the multi-track file I find that the music portion is always a huge jump in the sound wave over the speaking part of the recording. I've tried "normalizing" but that has never yielded good results. So, when I take the mixdown recording and then try to isolate the music part of the file to decrease the gain, you can always tell where the gain reduction is performed. It's a problem.
Thanks for any direction you might give to me.
