Need recording advice multiple sources to Macbook Pro

[WillMac4Food]

OK everyone, I need some advice in a major way! I am trying to get some video and audio capture together to put some sermons online for my church. We are very small and due to that and our set up I am not able to find a simple and economical solution to my situation.

I have the video part covered but there will be no audio captured at all. I prefer to capture it straight from the audio equipment so that there is no loss of sound or background noises.

What I am working with is (forgive me for any ignorance on my part), A Bose L1 system. It has a peavy wireless mic in channel 1, and our keyboard in channel 2. Then we have a a non powered mixer (peavy) 6 channel that has 4 mics, a guitar and a karaoke machine(for Cd's). This mixer is connected to channel 4 on the Bose.

I'm open to any suggestions you all may have. Or if there is somewhere else I should go with my questions by all means share that too.
Thanks in advance for any assistance on this!

 

[HoldernessMedia]

Several routes you could go here, it would help to know your budget for this.


Heres a quick, easy and cheap solution, not the best sound quality and not flexible for mixing, but it will achieve what you want to do.

http://www.amazon.com/PH62089-Stereo-Mini-Male-RCA-Male-Feet/dp/B0001GAOE0


According to your setup as described, do this.

1) Plug the RCA end of the cable into the RCA outputs of the Bose L1

2) Plug the 1/8" male end of the cable into the Line Input of the MacBook Pro.

3)In whatever recording software you're using on the Mac, go to the audio preferences. Select "Built In Line Input" as your audio input device.

4) Check your levels on the MacBook pro and make any necessary gain adjustments to get a good clean signal for your recording.


The downsides to this solution:

- inferior audio quality compared to using a multi channel audio interface with a good converter
- inflexible for mixing. Since everything will be recorded to a 2-track stereo audio file, Lu can't go in and adjust the volume of the indivdual audio sources.



Here is a better solution that costs a bit of money but is far more flexible for mixing and recording. You can buy an audio interface with 8 or more input channels, something like the Motu 8pre.

Motu.com/8pre

Witt this setup you would ditch the 6-channel mixer altogether and use the audio interface as your mixer to run all your mics, Karaeoke machine, etc. into the MacBook Pro. You could then record all your audio sources on their own tracks, much better for mixing afterwards. You would run the outputs of the audio interface into the Bose L1 to play through the speakers while still recording.

Downsides:

- cost
- a little more complex to setup