Laptop recording

When I record my tracks into my laptop I notice some quality loss. My only line in is the microphone input on the laptop. Is this the reason why my quality is bad?

Does anybody else record using their microphone input?

yeah i did - but now i got an external usb soundcard and it worx fine for me no latency or quality loss you get get on from 50 dollars up, try it it also makes your cpu faster

patalinda wrote:yeah i did - but now i got an external usb soundcard and it worx fine for me no latency or quality loss you get get on from 50 dollars up, try it it also makes your cpu faster

What kind of sound card do you have? Does it have MIDI I/O? And if it doesn't how can I connect MIDI to my laptop?

Well, you better off buying, wish ever soundcard u can get, instead record on to mic input,..the mic input uses a diffrent ohm scale, so it sounds crap'cause youre line livel aren't load enoff!,

I think on a laptop the mic recording input is mono. I was using that for a while, and when I was mixing and had some effects pan the left and right channel, that's when I noticed it was only get one channel. I bought this cool RCA -> USB device for like 75 bucks, and it came with some cables, and a nice recording program. It goes into USB and records as a wave. I haven't noticed any quality loss either.

It's called LP Recorder I believe...

http://www.cfbsoftware.com/lprecorder/lprecorder.htm

if you can afford it move up to a firewire card. I have a regular low end usb as a back up that i use on a laptop sometimes, and its not bad. But truthfully compared to a better card it leaves a bunch to be desired. on mine you cant really do 24/96 on two tracks while going in and out. Also it is noisy and very sensitive to interference. i got it to use for shows so i didn't have to haul a heavy rack around with my interface, and i end up having to unplug my lap to get a interference free signal. but the positives are it is cheap and small.

What about recording MIDI signals?