TubeNet

I used garage band for a while for this purpose, but I have had better luck with the free program Audacity. For whatever reason Garage Band had a lot more back ground noise ("hissing") than Audacity. And in my opinion Audacity is more simple and easier to use. I have been recording all of our brass quintet rehearsals and its helped out a lot. Also super easy to edit and export tracks into iTunes. Just my opinion...

The only USB microphone that I know of is Blue microphone's Snowball. It is readily available through various vendors, and it's about 150 bucks.

Garage Band actually works pretty well -- they have made some good improvements too -- the '06 version is solid. The upgrade is about $70 I think (and includes upgrades of all the other iLife stuff too)

Also, it seamlessly integrates if you want to jump up to Logic Express (which is like $300 and is an entry level professional audio program)

Cool Edit pro was fantastic -- I have not used it since Adobe bought it -- but I used to use it a LOT when I used PC -- I produced a few albums with it. Its editing capabilites are top notch -- things like compressors/reverb etc are not that great (compared to Logic or ProTools) but to just cut and paste etc, it is as good as they come (but is only for PC)

If you just wanna record practice sessions, just get a good minidisk mic and plug it into your mic in port and record into Quicktime uncompressed (aiff) The basic Mac inputs into the sound card are good quality and fairly low noise.

You can then dump it into whatever editing prog you want to use.

If just recording yourself practicing, heck -- keep it simple.

I do the same thing quite a bit, and just use the mono mic on my Powerbook, works just fine for practice reference. You dont have to spend a dime extra for that
(However it is good to upgrade to Quicktime Pro, which is like $30)

And, using a freeware metronome prog like MetroGnome and a Tuner prog like Perfect Pitch, everything I need is right there.


joe

The snowball is not the only. Samson now makes this model, though I know nothing about it.
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/C01usb/

I don't know if I agree that Audacity is easier to use and export to Itunes, Garageband 6 can export on the fly. But, anyway - here is where you can get Audacity for MAC for FREE! (two of my favorite words in one sentence, score.)

http://www.opensourcemac.org

Hope this helps.

- Pat Stuckemeyer