Frustrating day

Yesterday I surprised myself slightly by writing the final verse to the song that I wrote about a few months ago. Every so often I would tinker with the arrangement slightly, but finding words - or even a topic - seemed to be beyond me. About a month ago, I managed to write almost two verses, but threw them out a day later as they seemed to be repeating lyrically what I had written in an earlier song and they sounded very false. Since then, I have managed to write a verse a week, and yesterday, as I mentioned above, I wrote the final verse.

Today I had plenty of time on my hands, so I thought that I would record the vocals. I setup the microphone on the mike stand, plugged in and recorded a few takes. When I listened to them, the tracks had a terrible audio quality, as if they had been recorded at the bottom of a big hole. No amount of equalisation could save them. So I exchanged the microphone and headphones for the combination phones/mike which I used for several years, and recorded a few more takes. Whilst these sounded better, they were still very boxy. OK: I tried yet another microphone which I have. Slightly better but still bad.

At this stage, it occurred to me that the problem might not be with the microphones but rather with the cheap external sound card which I am using, that allows me to connect the microphone and phones to the computer via a USB connector. Years ago, I used to be able to connect the microphone to my 'music' computer and record with the multi-track recording program which I have. At some stage, recordings made this way started sounding bad, which is when I started to use the external sound card with Audacity to record on a mobile computer. Maybe I could try recording directly again.

At this point, the multi-track software ceased working: I get error messages about the sound card not being able to handle input. I tried different configurations but was unable to hear anything from this program. I should point out that other programs - wave editors and mp3 players - work correctly. Strangely enough, I was even able to use the multi-track program to mix the tracks which I had created, although this was not a good idea as the vocal wasn't synchronised with the music, apart from the poor quality of the sound.

So not only did I waste several hours trying to get a good vocal sound, I also managed to ruin the setup of the program which I need in order to turn the vocals into something which sounds good. Very frustrating.

I posted a question on the program's support forum, but I am not optimistic about getting a useful answer, primarily because I am using a very old version of the program.