Casual Conversation

For quality, I'd recommend Focusrite Scarlett. I've used the solo and the 18i20 and i love them across the board. A 3rd gen Solo is about $100usd, but you get a mic input, line input, RCA outs for speakers, and a headphone output and control. New also means software (ableton live lite, at least when I got mine way back when) so you can use the interface right away.

...realizing I'm on lemmy, so just in case: can't help much on the software front because I have a dedicated music pc with windows, but can confirm the Solo works like a charm with pop, zorin, and mint at least.

Don't forget the acoustics of the room you're in and perhaps get a pop-filter for your mic. These are simple things you can do that don't cost much. I saw a video once where the guy used a bunch of towels to dampen echos. Worked pretty well.

The most commonly recommended USB interface is Focusrite. Cheapest is to get a Behringer or similar brand.

My opinion: For a home studio, any interface will do fine for recording demos and practicing or just getting into it. If you ever become successful enough that you need to record better quality, you should go to a real studio anyway. There's really no reason to own expensive gear unless you're into owning expensive gear..

The normal interfaces are usually capable of live monitoring. You'll want live monitoring for practice and because the latency from the recording is too long to also use for listening while recording regardless of how low it gets.

The limitation of a cheap standard interface is that they usually only have 2 inputs, but it is sufficient for guitar and vocals, and it's usually not necessary to record more than one input at a time anyway.

Personally I do not have an interface. I use a USB mixer instead , because I have more instruments hooked up at once. There is a trick to set this up up for live monitoring, so I'll skip the details, but just to let you know that you might need more than an interface if you want to hook up more instruments or microphones eventually.

Focusrite Scarlett interface, Audacity software as others have said. A nice pair of headphones helps too if you want to add a vocal track later. FYI after you hook everything up you'll have to fiddle with input and output settings to get it all to work. I'm sure there are videos to help you. Once it's done you won't have to mess with it again

most of them are usb class compliant and so just worn. Beware of the expensive ones with built in mixers as often those need sbecial drivers that won't be ported toethe next version of windows. Some expentive ones have good linux drivers thourh and a last generation con be found cheap, still work great.

If you have a condenser mic, your microphone may require phantom power. I have condenser mics that do; they have XLR connectors, which I believe is the norm for that. So you'd need either a microphone amplifier that can provide that or an audio interface that can.

Do you need multiple tracks recorded concurrently (e.g. an instrument pickup and a vocal pickup)?

If not, I'm not sure that you need anything beyond a single line-in, which your computer may already have. If not...a to quality, I'm not a musician, but I've had plenty of sound cards and audio interfaces over the years, and my take is that if you don't know that you need a feature, my take is that you probably don't. I'd refrain from getting something fancy unless you find that you've got some kind of issues with it. I've hard more issues with background sound than something like electronic noise stemming from a recording device.

I use the free and open-source Audacity to do most audio stuff I need. It's simple, and if all you need is to record a track and then fiddle with it, it'll do that.

Ardour is a widely-used free and open-source DAW. I'm not particularly in love with it, but it provides multitrack support and non-destructive editing.

Thank you! I already have Audacity and this the route I will probably go. The M-Audio box might have phantom power. I might get that

I do this for a living if you get stuck and want to DM. I'd recco just getting a Focusrite Scarlett usb interface with enough inputs. Are you DIing your guitar (plugging it in) or recording it with a mic? There are plenty of free recording options. You on PC? If mac I'd just start with Garage Band. PC you could maybe just start with Audacity. Ardour is open source but I don't have experience with it. Reaper has infinite demo mode. There's a free pro tools but that might be a bit of a steep learning curve. If you want to add electronic elements it might be worth starting with one of the intro versions of Ableton.

Back in the day, roughly 20 years ago, I used a Roland Edirol UA-25 for that kind of stuff. It's durable, not very costly, and it can supply phantom power if needed. Not sure of that one is still available, but if not I'm sure a successor is out there.

As for software, I really like bitwig, as it has a native Linux version in addition to mac and windows. And their customer support department is excellent: They extended my trial period solely because I asked nicely. I bought an actual license a few months ago, and it's one of the better software purchases I've ever made. Right up there with Factorio.

EDIT: This seems to be the successor to UA-25: https://www.roland.com/global/products/rubix22/

Used to do this for a living and got a degree in this.

My favorite DAW is Reaper. You can use it indefinitely for free or pay a modest fee to support them.

As others said focusright is solid and affordable. I personally have the SSL2 interface and I have no complaints.

Guitar, going direct in with some amp/effect emulator like amplitube is hard to beat.

Use your condensor on stuff like your voice and acoustic. Get you an sm57 if your going to be recording your guitar amp as an affordable guitar/instrument mic.

cheap and good and easy - Behringer u phoria, plugs into your comp with usb, provides the 48v for your mic, you can use audacity as a GREAT versatile DAW that is miraculously free.

https://www.amazon.com/BEHRINGER-Audio-Interface-1-Channel-UM2/dp/B00EK1OTZC

reliable, durable, simple monitor that's inexpensive for the quality.

Audacity:

https://www.audacityteam.org/

incredibly stable, feature-rich, simple to use and almost fully customizable. still my favorite DAW