The world of music has changed. Decades ago, if you were a musician and you wanted to record an album you had to constantly play your music in clubs and bars every night.
You would hope that some big-shot producer would be at that specific time in the bar for you to get even get a chance at recording an album.
Today, some of the best artists record their music in their home studios using some basic tools like a computer, a USB microphone, and a pair of headphones.
A microphone works by converting acoustical sound into an electrical signal. You can change the final sound quality by modifying the signal through amplification or mixing.
A USB mic is a microphone that is designed to easily connect to computers, and paired with recording software, enables you to record your voice or any other sounds you might want to add to your music track.
One of the best USB microphones on the market is Snowball from Blue.
Snowball features the industry-leading Blue condenser capture technology that delivers natural sound directly to your desktop or laptop running Windows 10.
In order for you to match Snowball to your own personality, it comes in a variety of colors – textured white, gloss black, electric blue, orange, and chrome. You can always read the manual for using Blue Snowball.
To use Snowball for recording purposes, you will need software installed on your operating system.
In this article, we will explore the best options to use in order to pair your Snowball mic to Windows 10 and produce professional recordings easily.
What is the best Blue Snowball microphone software?
Adobe Audition
Adobe Audition is the very best digital audio editing software that you can use to edit, mix, record, and restore audio or design sound effects for a perfectly layered, robust sound.
This powerful DAW provides a complex toolset that includes multitrack, waveform, and spectral display for creating, mixing, editing and restoring audio content.
Speaking about multitrack, you can easily manage multichannel audio content in Adobe Audition. Simply separate all channels, group them based on the track type, and reroute source file channels.
Just keep in mind that the order in which you select the channels determines the channel order in the multi-track session.
Needless to say, you can also edit single channels from the built-in Waveform Editor.
Let’s quickly go through its key features:
Robust audio toolkit including audio cleanup, restoration, and precision editing tools (spectral frequency display, Diagnostics panel, effects, and more) Record, edit and integrate music clips Step-by-step, interactive tutorial guides Seamless integration with Adobe Premiere Pro and other third-party apps and devices (including the Blue mic) Essential Sound panel (for professional-quality audio) Pristine remix capacities (automatically rearrange any song to fit any duration) Sound effects (hundreds of royalty-free sound effects and a library with over 12K free sound effects)
Adobe Audition
Adobe Audition is a great software that pairs seamlessly with your Blue microphone, so check it out. Free trialVisit website
Wavepad by NCH
This audio editing software is a full-featured professional audio and music editor for Windows 10 that works perfectly with the Snowball microphone.
Wavepad Audio from NCH is free for non-commercial use and allows you to easily edit audio files – cut, copy and paste parts of recordings, add effects, amplification, and noise reduction.
It works as a wav or mp3 editor but also supports a wide range of file formats including vox, gsm, wma, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg, and more.
The master’s edition of this program has other additional effects and features that offer serious mixing and post-processing features at a sound engineer level.
Let’s quickly go through its key features:
Easy to use interface Sound editing tools – auto-trim, compression, pitch shifting, etc. DirectX and Virtual Studio Technology DLL plugins Ability to reduce vocals from a music track Can record voiceovers for multimedia projects Batch processing Scrub, search and bookmark audio for precise editing Advanced tools – spectral analysis (FFT), speech synthesis (text-to-speech) Supports sample rates from 6 to 192kHz Works directly with MixPad Multi-Track Audio Mixer
Wavepad
Check out this full-featured audio editing software to enjoy qualitative music, with tools like pitch-shifting, compression or noise reduction. FreeDownload
Audacity
Audacity is another very good option to use with your Snowball microphone. It’s one of the most popular sound editing applications. It offers a wide array of features, and it’s free and open-source.
Let’s quickly go through its key features:
Four user-selectable themes Four user-selectable colorways for waveform display in audio tracks Scrubbing Timer Record – enables you to schedule when a recording begins and ends to make an unattended recording MIDI playback Punch and Roll recording – for editing on-the-fly A large array of digital effects and plug-ins – Built-in LADSPA, VST(32-bit) and Nyquist plug-in support Multitrack mixing Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transform algorithm
⇒ Get Audacity
If you’re interested in other microphone models, check out our wide collection of guides.
Ableton Live
Ableton Live is another powerful tool you want to have in your ‘tool belt’ that works perfectly with the Snowball microphone from Blue.
It is very popular among musicians, sound designers, and artists from across the world.
Ableton Live bolsters a wide range of virtual devices that give you the possibility of creating professional-sounding music from scratch, or mix and edit existing songs.
Some new virtual devices presented in Ableton Live are:
Wavetable – A new synthesizer built into Ableton that can shape, stretch, and morph sounds using wave tables derived from analog synths Echo – combines the sound of classic analog and digital hardware in a single device Drum Buss – This is a workstation for drums and other instruments, capable of adding warmth and distortion, control dynamics with compression and transient shaping and control bass decay with the dedicated low-end section Pedal – This feature allows you to separately control models of overdrive, distortion and fuzz guitar pedals and is also capable of driving synth sounds and drums
Let’s quickly go through its pro key features:
Ability to capture MIDI You can edit multiple MIDI clips at the same time Offers the Arrangement View that can be optimized to quick editing and more efficient song creation Browser collections – allows you to create color-coded collections of plug-ins, samples, and devices for easy access Note chasing Input/ Output renaming
⇒ Get Ableton Live
Voicemeeter
Voicemeeter is an application endowed with Virtual Audio I/O and can be used as a main audio device by your system. It works very well with the Snowball microphone offering professional audio recording.
It supports all audio interfaces – MME, DirectX, KS, WaveRT, WASAPI, and ASIO to connect DAW audio or musical instruments.
The Virtual Audio mixer enclosed in VoiceMeeter is able to mix different audio sources coming from audio devices and applications.
This software also allows you to mix sounds coming from the Snowball microphone and other inputs such as music, movies, Skype calls, etc. It can mix 3 inputs into 3 outputs through 2 buses.
By including various DSP algorithms from VB-Audio, the tool lets you control the sound as you want, without any limitations whatsoever.
Its powerful features can be used by VOIP users, broadcasters, podcasters, video gamers, musicians, DJs, etc.
This tool is free to use for casual users offering you the possibility to pay what you want.
⇒ Get Voicemeeter
Garageband [Bonus: How to run it on Windows 10]
Garageband is a popular music app created for iOS operating systems that work extremely well with the Snowball microphone.
This app is perfect for music professionals and is loaded with a plethora of innovative features that allow you to create the best music.
It is easy to use and is considered to be one of the best apps developed by Apple.
In this article, we will show you a way to make it work on any Windows 10 PC with just a few steps.
Key features include:
The option to use a virtual keyboard or an external keyboard You can record, play, capture and share music easily Offers multi-touch features as well as trigger options Wide range of DJ style effects – filters, repeaters, vinyl scratching Option to select from nice electronic or acoustic drummers You can create over a million realistic grooves Simple user-interface Perfect for music professionals
In order to make Garageband work on Windows 10 PCs, you will need to use the iPadian Emulator. This emulator simulates the interface of an iPad on your Windows desktop.
You can easily set everything up by taking these steps:
Download iPadian on your Windows PC. Once you have downloaded the file, install it on your Windows PC to run the iPadian Emulator. Once it has been installed, open the iPadian emulator and go to the App Store. Search for GarageBand in the search bar and click on enter. Click on the GarageBand option and start downloading it.
Once you have downloaded the software, you can use GarageBand on Windows using the iPadian emulator.
In this article, we explored the best software options to use in Windows 10 to professionally record sound using Blue Snowball.
Whether you need software with an easy-to-understand user interface or want tools with professional recording capabilities and effects, this article covers it all.
We presented the best features of each software option and even gave you a solution to run iPad software on your Windows 10 PC.
Let us know what you think about the options presented here in the comment section below.