As an amateur musician, I value products that make it easy for me to take advantage of a few spare minutes to practice singing and playing guitar or making quick recordings. The Samson GTrack Condenser Mic is unique in that it is not only a USB condenser mic but also an audio interface with an additional 1/8" input jack for another instrument or a mono or stereo line input. The mic costs $149 and is available through the Apple Store. I found it in stock at my local store, but it also available online. The microphone comes with a desktop stand and several different cables to facilitate using the microphone with various inputs. Right out of the box, I was able to plug my acoustic guitar into 1/4" jack on one end of a cable and plug the other end into the mic input. There's also a headphone jack on the microphone and settings for direct monitoring. The direct monitor setting still passes through the sound from the computer for other recorded tracks for overdubs.A word of caution on using this product or any USB audio interface with Macs running Leopard is that USB audio is prone to attacks of horrific static during recording. You won't hear it while recording, but during playback you'll suspect that your picking up one of those EMF's they are always talking about on "Ghost Hunters." A Google search led me to see that many Mac users have returned the GTrack because of this static sound invading their recordings, but more research suggests this isn't a flaw in the Samson product but a flaw with OSX. The same sound occurs with a variety of interfaces and it is intermittent. One recording will be fine or the sound will invade your recording 2 minutes into the song.
The Ministry of Truth: Fixing USB Audio Static on Mac OSX posted a comment that originally appeared on the Apple Support discussion forum that seems to have led me to a solution to the audio static problem. It is interesting to note that my MacBook Air suffered this issue but not an older 12" Powerbook G4 also running Leopard. Since Apple is removing Firewire from its MacBook line, it is unacceptable for USB not to work reliably for music creation. At least the fix seems to be working so far.
I had so much fun with this mic. Here's a sample recording of me singing and playing "Blackbird"
