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My dad wants to do some voice recordings for some tenative voice over work.

Anyone have a recommendation for a mic and some recording software?His budget is around $100.

Thanks

As far as on the cheap goes, I bought a nice omni directional mic from radio shac for $35 bucks, it works great, and you can throw a stocking over it or the like to use as a sound screen.

I used windows built in cheapo recorder and then edited the sound in premier along wiht the video it was used for.

Granted i worked on getting it just right, the teacher didn't even notice the audio scrub and voice over for this particular video and I got an A. Goodluck.

Well, it wouldn't be hard to blow that entire budgent on the microphone alone... He might be able to find an old Sure SM58 around on eBay. They're great voice mics. I agree that Radio Shack is probably a good place to look too. They might have an inexpensive DJ mic or something.

As far as software goes, I bought a product called "Cool Edit 2000" a few years back. It was great for recording and editing. It would do normalization and all sorts of effects/reverb as well.

If I remember right, Adobe bought the company that produced it and is calling it something else now. You might check with Adobe and see if they have a version of their audio editing software in your price range.

-SF

I got a couple of mics from radio shack when a friend was in a band and wanted to do some recording. The cheap one was sucky, the two more expensive ones were pretty good. This was in high school, so even with several people chipping in our budget was small. The total for all three was maybe $100. They had a condenser mic that was actually quite nice-- condensers are the type that you put a battery in.

Cool Edit, after being bought by Adobe, is now Audition. Quite expensive. I recommend Audacity for recording. It's free, has a good feature set of the standard filters & effects, and is specialized for multitrack recording. That might be something you need for voice overs. If not, you don't actually have to use the multitrack stuff. best of all it is free.

If he's got a recent (6.x) version of Nero, the Wave Editor tool that comes with it is perfectly adequate for basic recording tasks. I've been using it to rip my vinyl collection to WAV files, and do all of the required cleanup (click removal, normalization, splitting into tracks, etc.). The resulting rips sound very good -- pretty much indistinguishable from CDs unless you crank the volume way up (in which case you can hear a bit of surface noise and turntable rumble... but this isn't Nero's fault).