May 27, 2010 12:55 pm Here's a quick rundown of the parts needed:
1) microphone (phantom power for condenser)
2) cable
3) preamp (supplying phantom power, if needed) *
4) cable
5) some sort of conversion, in an audio interface. This can be the soundcard, a UCA200 series of device, USB interface, FW interface, etc.
6) software ( acid, in your case )
7) conversion back to audio (done in a soundcard or similar)
8) monitoring solution (headphones, monitors w/ amp of some sort)
* sometimes, preamp and conversion (soundcard) is built together, in same device. Both operations still happen, but no cable is between them. Something like Line6 UX2 has preamps built in, and also do the conversion and send streams to the PC.
You say you're getting signal in the mixer, so I'd say you're off to a good start. Signal exists in the mixer. Now, we need to send signal out through some output, to the interface and into the computer.
I would; turn mixer channel 1 (or whatever your mic is plugged into) all the way left, then connect a cable between the MAINS L output to the L input on the interface LINE input. Don't worry about L / R now, as the stereo field gets created in ACID when mixing. Just record MONO for now, as that's what your (someone's) voice is: mono. Stereo gets created later.
Now you should have signal exiting the mixer, on MAINS L.
Now the interface should have signal coming into it, so now tell your software to use the INPUTS and OUTPUTS associated with that device. For UCA devices, I think it's Codec something. Hopefully this part is easy, as I don't know ACID.
Once ACID knows about the device, then I think you would create a track, and tell that track to 'listen' on L Input. Then, you need to 'ARM' that track, so anything coming in gets written to disk as bits and bytes. That's the conversion part, from analog to digital.
Press the big red button, and record your awesomeness.
Hopefully at this point, after you stop recording, you should have a waveform of some sort on the screen. If not, then something is amiss in the chain up to now, and we'll need to dig deeper.
Try these out, and let us know what's up, and if something doesn't seem right, or isn't working as expected.