Individual drum tracks

[bwanaben]

My first post here but previous to this your answers and comments have helped me tremendously already. I'm new to home recording but have been playing music a long time. I have a behringer eurorack ub1202 fx (which I love) connected to my dell inspiron 6000 laptop (meh). I am using audacity to record.

I have been doing some recording with my band going straight through the mixer into the computer and surprisingly the sound is pretty good. One annoyance is that I can't separate the drum tracks so that they are on one track each (1 for kick, 1 for snare, toms etc). I have a bunch of sm57s and sm58's to this isn't the problem. I was led to believe that it was a sound card issue so yesterday I bought a sound blaster x fi 5.1 card and hooked it up to the mixer and computer. Should I now be able to record multiple tracks simultaneously? The only reason I bought the card was so that I could multi track record at the same time.

I am going straight from the mixer into the line in on the soundcard.

Sorry if this seems like a silly question, ANY help, comments and feedback would be most welcome.

[fortyseven]

Originally Posted by bwanaben

I was led to believe that it was a sound card issue so yesterday I bought a sound blaster x fi 5.1 card and hooked it up to the mixer and computer. Should I now be able to record multiple tracks simultaneously? The only reason I bought the card was so that I could multi track record at the same time.

Im afraid your purchase might have been for naught. Soundblaster is awesome if all you want is good sound while playing games or watching movies but for recording, Im afraid its not all that great.
The problem when recording with a mixer is that although it might have a hundred channels, all those hundred channels output to stereo which gives you one file.
The only way you're going to be able to do what you want to is to get an interface that has as many inputs as you need for the drums.

[garww]

Ya, most of the consumer sound cards are stereo - two mono tracks. It may be possible that you can record from multiple stereo sound cards. depending on how well the drivers work together.

My much smaller behringer mixer has only stereo out - so I only get two tracks from that device. Most people get the soundcard with multiple recording channels - they send 4-8(whatever) separate tracks to the computer.

It , again, may be possible to ad a couple extra tracks with the Blaster, but this isn't the easy way to go.

There is a Sound Card Wizard on the site somewhere. It offers suggestions based on how many inputs you need, etc..