[TimR]

Hope you won't mind another newbie question. You were very gracious
last time.

I've been recording a lot of solo trombone and vocals, not for
production but just to monitor student's progress.

I've been using an old stereo condenser microphone, powered by an
internal AA, directly into the microphone port of a laptop running
Audacity, and getting usable results. In the past I've had fairly
decent amateur recordings with that mike into a tape deck. Not to you
guys's standards of course, but okay.

But I figured with an external sound card I could do better not only
at recording but at playback. So I bought an M-Audio Fasttrack Pro,
and plugged the same mike into it. I don't get enough signal level to
do usable recordings. In fact it doesn't record at all unless I turn
the gain all the way to the stop.

I expected an interface with preamps would give me more signal than
the laptop's builtin port, but I get less.

So what did I do wrong? Bad choice of interface? Maybe got a
defective one? Something I'm missing? Or was the whole thing a dumb
idea? It's the only mike I had handy, I was going to upgrade one
piece of signal path at a time.

I was also hoping to use this to put some LPs on to the computer,
haven't tried that yet but suspect that'll be too low as well. Output
is pretty good, I like the audio quality.