hey everyone, im looking to get some insight on how i should set up my future recording "studio". I'm a hobbyist musician that loves recording, but I've had some major gripes with it before; let me explain.

At first I used a cheap 15dollar logitech 1/8th microphone to record guitar and vocals (you may laugh, but i was surprised by the quality.) this was in audition using asio4all drivers to get live monitoring. this for me was always a hassle because for one, it was a shit mic, and audition was always crashing using asio4all, plus i could not rewire reason, as by using asio4all, you can only have audio app running at the same time.

scenario two: i borrowed my friends m-audio mobile pre with a very nice XLR mic he said cost ~$250(i think its the Rode's NT1, the sound quality was amazing, but i constantly got errors such as "the audio device and then something about latency" but usually it would work just fine. when i tried rewiring reason into audition, i realized it was laggy and not on time, and very buggy causing audition and reason to crash constantly. even when it wasnt rewired, i couldnt really have them running both at the same time.

it seems like i have used the two popular set ups, yet both caused problems for me. i have a pretty fast system, (intel core 2 quad q9550) with 4gb of ram, so it seems like the crasheds and the latency should not be happening. although the obvious culprit could be the soundcard which is just the built in soundcard on my gigabyte ep45-ud3p motherboard.

i am planning on buying a decent budget system in the near future (mic setup, usb interface (if called for),midi keyboard) to continue my hobby ,and i was wondering what kind of advice i could get from you guys on running a setup meant for recording in audition, with reason rewired, or at least running alongside with audition. feel free to link to equipment you think i should consider.

thanks so much!