Yet another newbie request... (1 Viewer)

[Tony Ramone]

Hi everyone, I know there's plenty of threads in this forum from noobs looking for info on what sort of equipment is necessary to start up home recording, but after going through several different posts on mics, interfaces, souncards etc., I figured it'd be easier if I posted my own request to collect all the ides here in one place.
At the moment all I've got is a crappy laptop (USB 2.0, no firewire) and I'm using a little mic that came with a minidisc player into the line-in to record guitars, bass and vocals into Cubase (I've only just installed it so I've had no time to play around with it yet), then I've got GrooveAgent to do the drum tracks.
This is just to record demo versions of our songs so the rest of the band can learn them, but I'm looking to get some sort of proper set up - a better mic for a start: I was thinking maybe an AT2020 - does anyone here know if these are any good? I was going to opt for the USB one, but I was told there could be latency problems with USB mics. Then as an interface with the laptop I was thinking maybe something like a MBox (I've used ProTools in college so I'm more familiar with that than Cubase). Thing is, is a MBox USB or FireWire driven? At the moment all I really need I suppose is 2 inputs, maybe even 1 would do. Then further down the line when I actually want to record a proper drumkit I'll look for something bigger, or get a PC with a firewire card and borrow my drummer's Motu.
Anyway, sorry I've waffled on for so long, any advice is welcome. Cheers.

 

[pissypants]

Budget?

 

[Tony Ramone]

I'm not sure of my budget at the moment - in fact I might have to put the whole thing on hold for a while: mortgage payments are crippling me! I think I'll start off by getting a decent PC together rather than this crappy laptop. So far Vista doesn't seem to support any of the software I want to use, I'm reduced to recording with either Audacity or Fruity Loops...