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Anyone use their Zoom recorders as a mic--->laptop for recording?


Chicken Monkey

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I love the way my acoustic sounds when recorded on the zoom. I can't get that sound with any of the mics I've got, nor with the 1/4" out. I'd love to run my Zoom directly into my laptop recording software. I can find directions online for turning the Zoom into a USB mic, but I actually would like to run out of the 1/8" jack, if possible--I have an audio interface that I'd like to plug it into. To use it as a USB mic, I'd have to remove my audio interface and re-arrange my computer audio preferences every time I switched instruments.

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What style "In" jacks does your I/F have? Typical are 1/4 and XLR. You could get a 1/8 female to 1/4 male (Shadio Rack) adapter but you're back to possibly lesser audio quality than through the shielded XLR. Unless you're going for an in-your-face official staging of the audio capture why not just use it as a recorder and dump the audio to the DAW later?

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I could do the dump for a rhythm guitar track. I'd really like to use it to capture some other, less "fundamental" acoustic sounds, though. For example, and I know this sounds ridiculous, I do some hambone that doesn't translate to any of my mics nearly as well as it does to the zoom. If I wanted to add some of that to a track, I'd need to use the zoom as a mic, while listening to the track I'm playing along with through my interface. The interface has 1/4 and XLR "in"s, but running 1/8" cord out of the headphone jack of the zoom into an adapter into the interface doesn't seem to do it.

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I gave my H2 away last xmas, but mine would always just show up in my DAW after I ran through the whole Zoom USB mic hookup process. In Ableton it'd automatically be added to the Input Configurations list. That's where I'd look for it in another DAW, wherever you select inputs for the track.

And I agree, it was a nice sounding mic for being a portable recorder.

Edit to add that I was also able to get it running through the 1/8" Ext. Out, but it didn't sound as good as the USB connection.

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Using it as a straight interface should give you audio track monitoring from the DAW while recording into a separate one. I've done this with a recording I dumped and then went back into it with phone and mic through the Zoom. You will have to reset the audio input from Preferences but that should be the only adjustment (switch) you'll need to do. Obviously, this removes your normal I/F from the chain. Unreasonable?

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Using it as a straight interface should give you audio track monitoring from the DAW while recording into a separate one. I've done this with a recording I dumped and then went back into it with phone and mic through the Zoom. You will have to reset the audio input from Preferences but that should be the only adjustment (switch) you'll need to do. Obviously, this removes your normal I/F from the chain. Unreasonable?

 

 

I'm hoping to avoid pulling my interface out, because I sometimes crash when I pull it out. I can do that if I must, but the point of starting the thread was to see if I could get around it.

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