Alrighty, so here we are in January & as I've been dusting off my home recording studio & testing all equipment, I realized my M-Audio Luna II mic was dead in the water. I checked the XLR cable & found out it was definitely my mic, which meant it was time to find a replacement. As my mic was 11 years old, when I was researching a replacement, I wasn't finding the quality for the price. I'd like to add that the market for a condenser mic has changed as a lot of people are YouTube creators nowadays, so we're seeing tons of podcast mics on the market (eye roll). Any random Joe, Dick or Harry in a Guitar Center may tell you they are perfectly fine to record vocals....I adamantly disagree.
After an arduous search, I found an excellent quality mic through Sweetwater Sound. It picks up the highs & lows really well while maintaining a very warm tone overall. It doesn't need a Cloudlifter, which would've been necessary with a podcast style mic. I've also been really impressed with their customer support and tracking for my shipment.
Next up is the LaCie Mobile Drive. Ok, so here's the deal: the external hard drives I had were again, over 10 years old. One of my drives was 1TB, but the drive itself was quite large...took up a lot of desk space & had moving parts. All drives nowadays have gone to SSD, so this was obviously old technology & it was running slow as I'm sure you can imagine. Time to go! I purchased two 5TB externals: one that does auto backups of my iMac and the other to back up music files only.
And now for the really sad news....my iMac is too old & needs to be replaced before I can load a new DAW. I've been using GarageBand for over a decade & that's worked out really well when all I was doing was recording raw guitar & vocals. With that said, when you begin using plugins, it substantially increases the bandwidth needed from your computer. I would like to use sound banks from Splice and Waves Audio, virtual instruments from Native and Output's Arcade, etc. Every time I tried to even launch Ableton Live or Pro Tools, I'd get nothing but the pinwheel of death. "Scotty, we don't have the power." SO, for now, I'm practicing guitar & piano while I save for a new computer. This is just one of those speed bumps you have to get over when you're pursuing your dreams.