DescentBB

I bought a radio shack boundary microphone, plugged it into the microphone input on the santa cruz sound card and then tried to use goldwave to record sounds. Nothing happens. I goldwave I tried both microphone and line in settings, default sound drivers and santa cruz drivers and yet to sound is being recorded. I also tried the different bounded to selection, bounded and looped and unbounded in the record settings. So what am I missing?

Make sure mic input in control panel is not muted. Most of the time it is.

I think I discovered the problem. A switch inline requires a battery and of course when radio slut sold the mic to me they neglected to tell me about it. Sheeee-it.

I spoke too soon...there was a battery! O.K. now it works. I'm getting a annoying background electronic hum (I'm recording spring peeper noises out my window). How do I either insulate against this hum or can I wash it out using Goldwave?

Chipper, the hum may be unavoidable with a budget mic since those aren't balanced. Best advice would be to turn off all other unnecessary electric appliances (especially overhead flourescents if present) in the room and at the plug to determine if that removes some of it. If you have alot of cables balled up from your PC near the mic cabling that will also cause interference. A good software EQ can usually isolate what you want and notch out what you don't but I'm not familiar with the softwrae you're using to know how good its filters are.

The "Mike Mute" simply prevents the sounds from the mike coming out the speakers and causing feedback. It doesn't stop you recording with it. That's in the TBSC control panel.

Other "Mute" options stop the mike from working.

You won't be able to record outside noises with a traditional microphone, because they are custom designed to drop sounds further than a few inches from the mike: this prevents background noises from interfering with your recordings!

You'll need proper high-gain mike's to record bird song and that sort of thing.

Chris the mic I have is able to record the spring peeper sounds (they are pretty loud here-a-bouts), but it is the low electronic hum that I am now trying to eliminate. The nice man at radio shack didn't understand either where the sound was coming from either.
There are no flourescent light and the mike is a good 20 feet from the comp and all the wiring. So give me some ideas

Well the answer appears to be...wind noise. So now I have to look for blimps and wind screens. Isn't the learning process fun

You can test that theory by putting a wooly sock over the mic.

i'm battling computer fan noise with a condenser mic. i have to chuck pillows and blankets over my pc to track.