You're new to audio recording and you've been told that
you need an audio interface to get started so what is an audio interface
in this video I'm going to try to
answer that for you and I'm
going to also show you how to use an audio interface coming up
Welcome to Simple Green Tech I'm Radio Zane
I'm a professional broadcaster and on this channel
I do audio tech tips, tutorials, and reviews
to help you unleash your creativity
In this video we're looking at the question
what is an audio interface well an audio interface
is a piece of gear that allows to you connect analog
and digital sound sources to your computer
and you're probably thinking great
my laptop has a mic input and a headphone jack
I guess that's all I need for an audio interface
if you absolutely must you can use
that for recording but the quality is not going to be that great
this is where a stand alone audio interface
really excels they have high quality
converters inside that take your analog source
convert it to digital so your computer will understand
and then it converts it back to analog so you can hear it
and these are called AD/DA Converters
They do this conversion in pretty much real time
there's very minimal latency
so you can have a backing track playing on your computer
and you can record guitar or voice over top of it
with effects on it and you're going to hear it
in pretty much real time another great thing about a
USB Audio interface is that it's going to have higher quality
mic preamps in it so if you're recording
your voice for singing, podcasting or streaming
You're going to want to use some mic preamps
and the good news is that even budget audio interfaces
like this Behringer UMC22
they actually have decent mic preamps in them
I'll put a link to it in the description below in case you want to check out
more of the features and see the latest pricing
so now you're probably thinking there's budget priced audio interfaces
and there's audio interfaces you've likely seen that are in the
thousands of dollars
so what's the difference one o the main differences in
cost in an audio interface is the quality
of the AD/DA converters
those are the things I told you about earlier that transfer your
analog to digital and your digital back to analog
the higher quality the AD/DA converters
the more your audio interface is going to cost
another one of the main differences in audio interface pricing
is the amount of inputs that your interface has
this one here has an instrument input
and it also has an XLR input for a
microphone and this can also be used as a line input
for a quarter inch plugin. With this
audio interface I can recorded two sources
at the same time and record them to two separate tracks
another thing that can affect the pricing of your audio interface
is the brand name a brand that's known
for making quality audio gear can demand a higher
price than a brand that's maybe brand new
or not known as well for making quality gear
but that's not to say that some of the lower price audio interfaces aren't as good
actually they can be just as good as
some of the lower end models of the bigger brands
just because it has that big name brand on it doesn't
mean they put the same high quality components inside
that they use for their higher end models so that's something
to keep in mind when you're searching for an audio interface
you don't want to just pay for a brand name when a
budget audio interface will give you the same quality
and the next reason that I have for the pricing difference in audio interfaces
it kind of goes with the brand name
it's the mic preamps that are
in each audio interface Behringer has
Xenyx or Midas preamps now Focusrite has
Focusrite preamps but you gotta remember
the mic preamp in my Focusrite 2i2
is not the same mic preamp in a Focusrite ISA One
those are high-end mic preamps and
they're very well known in the audio world
and the Focusrite Scarlett models do have great mic preamps in them
they're just not ISA One mic preamps
and the final reason that I'll give you for the audio interface pricing difference
is the features and sometimes the software
that it's bundled with. So an audio interface like this
has phantom power on it. Some audio interfaces
don't have that. Some have separate volume controls
for the main output and the headphone jack
some come with a great suite of software like VST plugins
or even a DAW sometimes and another thing
that goes along with the features is what type of
audio interface is it? this one is an USB audio interface
there's ones that will connect to your iPhone
and there's firewire
I'm not sure if they still make firewire but there used to be
there's USB C audio interfaces
so those types of things can change the pricing
of your audio interface
now those were some of the main reasons for the pricing
difference in audio interfaces and if you're a new musician or
a new streamer and you're just starting out looking for an audio interface
There's nothing wrong with getting a budget priced audio interface
something like my Behringer here
is still going to give you great quality results
and you can always upgrade this later as more funds
become available to you. Remember nobody's listening to
your music or your content and thinking wow man
can you hear how great this guy's RME audio interface is
no. they'e listening and saying wow
this is great content. wow this is great music
they're not listening for the interface so make great content
and you don't have to worry about your audio interface
so now you should have an idea of what an audio interface is
and what it does. let's get this connected to the computer
and test it out for recording
so you just plug the usb cord into the back of the interface here
connect the other end to your computer
and an audio interface like this one will actually install
itself. If you have a different audio interface
you might need to go to the manufacturer's website
and download the drivers for it
alright so I now have my microphone connected
to my Behringer UMC22 audio interface
and what we need to do now is open up a DAW
which is software for recording and if you want to
check out som free DAWs I've actually done a video
on my top 5 FREE DAW picks
so I'll link to that in the description in case you want to check that out
in this video I'm actually using Tracktion T7
It's a great free DAW and
it's actually my favorite one so what we
want to do once it's open is we want to go up to settings
and then in the audio devices section
we want to make sure that it says ASIO here
and then choose our device from the list here
I'm using the Behringer USB audio one so
I'll click on that. And we can now open up a new
project or an existing one so here we are in our
project and we want to now record with our
audio interface. so what we'll do is click over here
and we want input 1 that's the input
I'm going to be recording into if your audio interface
is different. Choose the input that you're going to be using
so you can see that I'm talking and that there is
some sound going in which is great
so now we want to arm this track for recording by pressing here
and then down here once we hit record
it's going to record everything onto this track
this is a test of recording with the
Behringer UMC22 audio interface
this is for my what is an audio interface video
I hope you're enjoying it so far
ok so we now have that piece of audio recorded
and if we wanted to use that as a backing track say that
was a guitar that we just recorded and we want to use it as a backing track
and then record our vocal overtop
we can just drag that down to this track here
and then we're still armed for recording so whatever we
record onto here is just going to go into another track
over top of this and we'll actually be able to hear
this second track as well.
it's going to sound kind of weird because we're recording two
voices over top of one another but this is just for
an example so let's hit record
alright here I am recording over top of another
track and it sounds pretty weird so let's stop this now
so there you go. If you're recording any sort of
instruments or if you had some sort of loop
that you wanted to record over top of that's how you can do it
with a USB audio interface click this
video up here to see my top 5 FREE DAW selections
and click this one down here to see what YouTube recommends you watch next
I hope you found this video helpful in finding out
what an audio interface is also
be sure to subscribe to the channel in case you want to see more videos
like this one. For Simple Green Tech
I'm Radio Zane and we'll talk soon