Recording...or not...yet again

Someone donated an M audio interface to GRC and I was gonna take it for a test ride under the guise of testing it for camp but secretly cause I've wanted one forever. It turns out it is a firewire device, which I have no way to hook into. On a whim I stopped into a local music store to see if they had firewire to usb converters. They didn't, and they looked it up on the internet for me and we figured out together that you don't really want to try to convert firewire to usb for audio...it doesn't work that way (flash back to my optical to usb quest). While I was waiting for them to look stuff up, on the clearance table I found a Yamaha Audiogram3 with Cubase ai5 software for $71. It had a usb hookup and worked with my operating system. What the hell thought I?

Of course, as these things go, "plug and play" wasn't really the case. I'd hoped to set this up on my old laptop, but quickly figured out that I'm so behind on Windows updates on the thing that it crashes when you try to update or install anything. Sigh.

I successfully used up the very last bit of memory on my other laptop installing the thing. Can't quite get it to work right yet though. And the latency is horrible (you sing...and the sound returns to you half a second later). I found my project for "Do You Love Me Now" and suddenly wondered why I'd bought the thing at all...for here was a multi-tracked project in Audacity that I clearly put together WITHOUT a device at all.

That said, it would be nice to be able to record two tracks at once if I can get the thing to work and one would assume that it would be better quality (it has a pre-amp) than what I could get from my pc mic input. I also want to try using one of the mixers that GRC also recently acquired to see if I could record a live band all at once (though, of course, the tracks would not be separate, but once upon a time this worked pretty good for SPB demos).

I'm not sure if I'll play with it for a while and then return it if I can't get it to work...or rack it up to life and just let it sit in the corner and make me feel guilty and like a failure for the rest of my life.

Why is this so HARD? It's like the central ongoing pain in my ass of my musical life.