Hi, I joined a couple of days ago. I’m fairly new to all this and a lot of the techie stuff goes straight over my head so please be gentle with me when answering LOL!
I have an MM6. When I take it down to my friend’s professional studio to record songs, we hook it up to Sonar via MIDI no bother but I would like to have my own little basic recording set up at home so I recently got big and brave and installed the Cubase AI4 disc on my fairly new laptop but it told me that its soundcard doesn’t work with Cubase and I can’t record audio.  I have managed to gather that I will need a USB type soundcard but can anyone please advise which one? I have an emachines E627 laptop with Windows 7 and 64 bits (if that means anything to anyone?!).
Also it says in the manual that only certain USB sticks are supported.  How do I know which ones? Do I just apply trial and error here?
Don’t want to be rich n famous, just want to be able to record my own songs for my own pleasure that are personal to me and I don’t like having to bother my friend (good as he is to me) every time I want to simply record something.
Thank you,

Beth.

Soundcards that come on computers are typically good for the basic “playback” roles that 99% of computer purchasers require. Musicians, being “special” people and clearly about 1% or less of the population, require more.

Timing is critical for musicians. If you are playing back an MP3 or any audio file and it starts 250ms after you press play, the average person does not care or even notice. But as a musician try and play along with a file with a 30ms delay and you find it near impossible.

Therefore a whole slew of devices are available to do the job of delivering audio into your computer in a “timely” fashion.

You can take a look at some entry level units here:
Yamaha AudioGram USB-AUDIO interfaces

Most USB sticks will work, the disclaimer is because no music company can test them all. What you want to be concerned about is those that come with COPY PROTECTION software built-in. This Copy Protection I guess is designed to keeep business documents safe from prying eyes… what it winds up doing is make it impossible for musical devices from reading or writing to the drives… Fortunately most companies that include this COPY PROTECTION (I call it Music Prevention) software also include a removal tool (don’t throw away your packaging before reading about how to remove this copy protection..) If you do, you can always go to http://www.U3.com and find the link to the U3 software removal tool.