My sister has a mic, a good voice, and a Mac, and she's getting voice-over work. I'm trying to help her set up a simple home studio, and so far we haven't hit on any combination of hardware and software that hasn't either been unreliable or ridiculous overkill. Her needs are extremely simple: to record herself in one mono track, perform a few basic edits (normalize, insert, cut), and export as either uncompressed (WAV or AIFF) or MP3.
We have tried SoundStudio, Audacity, and now ProTools LE 7.2 with Mbox 2, and the complexity has been comical in the extreme. The last straw came when, after recording 50 minutes of material, she tried to output her work as a WAV file using the Bounce command, and learned that it would take ... 50 minutes! (I now understand why, but that's not the point.)
Half of the battle has been getting an A/D converter box that is DIRT SIMPLE to use (prior to Mbox we were using a "Firebox" I think), and getting the Mac and audio software to all be in agreement as to where the sound is coming in from. The other half of the battle is finding audio software that is robust, simple, and can work with the hardware. I'd hoped that a hardware/software solution like Digidesign would solve the integration problems, but it hasn't really made the job easier, and working out all the OS version dependencies was completely maddening.
It occurs to me that investing in a USB microphone might eliminate the hardware complexity. If so, then it might be possible to use it with nearly any audio software, right?
If someone can suggest a good, minimal solution, I'd be grateful.