I am a school teacher. What is the best way to connect my electric or miked accoustic to my pc and play through the pc speaker system. The speakers have the third woofer speaker, an okay speaker set-up for a desktop computer.

Sir,

I find using something that connects using a firewire is best, depending on your computer the USB devise can cause a delay. There is less delay if you use the firewire for both live and recording. Something like the Presonnus firebox can be gotten second hand on ebay and is a great interface, there are other similar.

Steve

Thanks Steve and Pebber, I'll check into both those items.

Audio interface. (you can skip the whole latency issue, driver testing and troubleshooting that comes from using the pc audio card or some usb mics, allthough Asio4all seems to be very popular and reliable for optimizing latency)


I recommend you get an external Audio Interface.
Price ranges from 30 eur to 1500.


Read about what they do so that you can buy the most relevant for your needs :)


Good luck

I use an Apogee Jam device to connect my electric guitar to my MacBook Pro. One end connects to the cable from the guitar and the other end plugs into the USB port on the Mac. I then connect my external speakers to the headphone port on the Mac and run Garage Band, where I have a large selection of amps and stomp boxes to choose from and fiddle with. The sound is quite remarkable and the Apogee Jam can also run through an iPad, if necessary. I am not affiliated in any way with the device but I thoroughly recommend it.

For recording yourself, the line 6 audio interfaces work great with no noticable latency. I use the GX but am considering upgrading to the KB version if/when I start putting songs together.

For mixing your guitar, a mic and sending that combined signal through a webcam for lessons with Pebber the mixing board / sound card option might be the way to go. I don't have that setup. While the quality of sound that I get in my house is great, when I Skype with Pebber he says it sucks. In fairness though, the quality I get back from him isn't perfect either (and it gets to my ears through my audio interface and powered speakers), so internet connectivity and/or Skype software could be a limiting factor as well.