Blue Microphones Snowball USB Microphone Bundle | 
| Brand: Blue
List Price: $139.00
Buy New: $87.00
You Save: $52.00 (37%)
New (26) Used (1) from $92.77
Rating:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 32
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 8.6 x 5
Blue just keeps coming up with recording solutions, and the Snowball makes computer recording easier than ever! The Snowball is a USB direct-recording microphone and the next of kin to Blues unusually hip lineup of spherical mics. The Snowball is designed for mobile laptop use and desktop studios with its universal drivers for Mac and Windows and built-in plug-and-play USB connectivity. Designed for desktop recording applications, the Snowball incorporates Blue's styling with versatility and eas
Warranty: 1 year, tubes 90 days
MPN: BLU SNOWBALL
Model: BLU SNOWBALL
UPC: 836213001837
EAN: 0836213001851
ASIN: B000EOPQ7E
Release Date: April 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Plug and play design no software required! | | • | Professional studio quality performance record both vocals and instruments | | • | Mac and PC compatible | | • | Blues renowned circuit and unique two-capsule design | | • | Switchable mic patterns for a variety of recording applications |
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Product Description
Finally, a USB mic that's not only easy to use, but sounds as good on your desktop as it does in a professional recording studio. Meet the Snowball, the world's first professional USB mic.Whether you're recording a guitar at your kitchen table or a complete band in the studio, the Snowball can capture it with detail unheard of before in a USB mic.The Snowball is a direct plug and play mic that connects to either a Mac or PC - no additional software is needed. With its dual capsule design and unique three-pattern switch, the Snowball can handle everything from soft vocals to the loudest garage band - and it's ideal for podcasting. Check it out and you'll see why it's the coolest mic in town.
From the Manufacturer
Finally, a USB mic that's not only easy to use, but sounds as good on your desktop as it does in a professional recording studio. Meet the Snowball,™ theworld's first professional USB mic. Whether you're recording a guitar at your kitchen table or a complete band in the studio, the Snowball can capture it with detail unheard of before in a USB mic. The Snowball is a direct plug n' play mic that connects to either a Mac or PC - no additional software is needed. With its dual capsule design and unique three-pattern switch (cardioid, cardioid with -10dB pad and omni), the Snowball can handle everything from soft vocals to the loudest garage band — and it's ideal for podcasting. Check it out and you'll see why it's the coolest mic in town. | Podcasting Perfected and More
Golly. What is that thing?
Simply put, the Snowball is Blue Microphones' revolutionary new USB microphone—the first studioquality USB mic on this (or any other) planet. It's never been easier to get live audio into your Macintosh or Windows desktop or laptop. Just plug it in, adjust your input level and you're up and running! Ok. But what's so great about it?
Aside from its simple direct interface, the Snowball is simply the best-sounding USB mic on the market, and with two pickup patterns and a separate setting for really loud sounds, it's versatile enough to cover a wide range of recording and real-time applications, from high quality podcasting and telephony to vocal and instrument recording in both home and professional studios. Whether you're recording a podcast, a guitar at your kitchen table or the whole band in the studio, the Snowball can capture it with detail unheard of in a USB mic. iPod, therefore iPodcast.
Of course you want to do your own podcast! Enter the Snowball — the perfect solution for professional-sounding results in an affordable, easy-to-use package. Ideal for any application where you need to get high-quality audio into your computer, the Snowball unites the heritage of vintage classic microphones costing thousands of dollars with cutting edge technology and an ease of use never imagined! Engineered to be heads and ears above built-ins and "computer store" mics, the Snowball can handle everything from vocals to sound effects and, of course, just about any musical instrument! Yep, it's included.
The Snowball includes a shielded USB cable and a spiffy desktop mic stand. You also get an easy-to-understand manual with loads of recording tips, so you can literally set-up your Snowball and be recording in just a matter of minutes. Plus, a variety of software recording applications are compatible with the Snowball,* including Apple's new GarageBand 3. Give it a listen — you won't believe your ears. |  | | The world's first professional studio-quality USB mic, from Blue. | Features & Functionality
- What exactly is this Snowball all about?
The Snowball is a revolutionary microphone. Leave it to Blue to reinvent the wheel… err, microphone once again! With USB connectivity, it has never been easier to get live audio into your Macintosh or Windows desktop or laptop. Just plug it in, adjust your input level and you're up and running. - Is The Snowball a dynamic microphone like the Blue Ball, or a condenser like the Blue 8Ball or Kiwi?
The Snowball is a condenser, which, according to the audio wonks we know, has a smooth open sound with a nice, natural high-end. - I've heard that condenser microphones require something called phantom power. Do I need to concern myself with this? Does The Snowball need batteries?
No. The Snowball derives its operating voltage from something called bus voltage, which is always present on your USB port. As long as the red LED is glowing, you know you've got power. The Snowball does not require batteries. - Do I need any special software to use The Snowball? Do I need any drivers?
Technically, no. Depending on your application, your OS may have sufficient features to utilize the capabilities of The Snowball. But, to get the most out of your Snowball, you'll want to have some kind of software that allows for digital signal processing and non-linear editing that will accept audio from the USB port. Some examples of these programs are listed below. As long as you are using Windows XP or Apple OSX, you will not need any drivers. - Can I use The Snowball with a traditional analog audio mixer?
No. The Snowball features digital output only. It must be connected to a USB port in order to function. - What sample rate and word length does The Snowball use?
The Snowball's digital output is set to 44.1 kHz / 16-bit, just like an audio CD. But this is something that only audio geeks really need to worry about. - How can I select a different sample rate?
Because The Snowball is designed for the greatest ease of operation and setup, sample rate / word length are not user-definable. Sorry, geeks. - Can I use more than one snowball at a time?
Some audio editing software allows for multiple USB connections. Check with your software vendor - they should have technical support staff who can answer all of your questions about their product. - What does cardioid and omnidirectional mean? Why should I care?
These are the two polar patterns The Snowball is capable of producing. If you think of polar patterns as the shape of the area that a microphone "hears," omnidirectional hears everything at equal volume from all angles (in a 360o sphere surrounding the mic), while cardioid only hears what's right in front of it at full volume and other sounds at increasingly diminished volume as the sound source moves further away from the center of the mic (audio techs call this off-axis). You should care because one of the most useful features of a microphone is the ability to control its pickup. We like polar patterns so much, that some of our professional studio microphones have as many as nine different patterns! With The Snowball, we've given you the two most likely to be useful to you. - What is The Snowball used for? Is it a vocal mic, an instrument mic or both?
The Snowball was designed to provide a wide range of applications where a high-quality transducer (a fancy way to say microphone) is needed, but so is ease of use and setup. Though most professional engineers prefer certain microphones for certain applications, we designed The Snowball for use with a wide variety of sources. Here are some suggested applications we came up with when we were locked in Blue's patented anechoic think tank: instrument and voice for music production / pre-production / demos, DV-looping / dialog, podcasting, sound effects, audio sampling, interactive programming, video sweetening / post, internet telephony, internet conferencing, recording lectures, poetry slams, spoken word performances and speeches by your favorite politician - generally anywhere where you need an easy-to-use microphone and you have access to a computer with a USB port. Happy recording! - Do I need to keep The Snowball in the freezer when I'm not using it?
No. This is one snowball that won't melt!  Please note: as there are so many different software packages that are compatible with The Snowball, we are compiling a list of software we've tested and assured compatibility. We will publish that list shortly along with detailed instructions explaining how to use The Snowball with each package because, as you can imagine, they are all different! In the mean time, we suggest consulting your software's manual, user forums and technical help lines. Here are a few to get you started: Software Setups
How to get audio from my Snowball with… - Garage Band
- Go to Preferences->Audio and select the Blue mic as the input device (it will only show up when The Snowball is plugged in).
- Create a vocal track and select the Blue mic as the input device for that track.
- You may need to adjust the Snowball's input level in the control panel if you experience any distortion (crackling).
- Logic 7
- Open the Audio and MIDI setup program in your Apps->Utilities folder.
- Create an Aggregate Audio Source (Audio menu - open Aggregate device editor).
- Add the devices you want to use to the aggregate device (Built in audio and Blue mic).
- Change the audio device in Logic's audio preferences from Default to Aggregate.
- Sonar
- Select "USB Audio Device" ( 1, in, 0 out) from an audio track.
- From within that subcategory, there are 3 selections: Left USB Audio Device, Right USB Audio Device, and Stereo USB Audio Device.
- Select Left or Right for mono audio tracks.
- Press "R" to arm the track for recording.
- Roll disk.
- Adobe Premier Elements 4 (Windows Vista/XP)
- First, make certain that your Snowball has the latest firmware update. With this latest update installed, you'll be good to go. If you should experience any problems getting the program to recognize the mic, Adobe recommends the following:
If the device does not allow you to record, then your microphone is not being detected as a valid input device in Premiere Elements. You can use an open source program called ASIO4ALL, which is a device driver that essentially wraps existing WDM devices, like USB microphones, as ASIO-compatible sound devices. Use the following steps to utilize this tool: - Quit Premiere Elements.
- Visit the following web page and download the latest available version of ASIO4ALL: http://www.asio4all.com/
- Install the software, and restart the system if asked to do so by the installer.
- Make certain that your microphone is plugged in.
- Launch Premiere Elements.
- Go to the 'Edit->Preferences..>Audio Hardware' menu option.
- For the Default Device, choose the ASIO4ALL option.
- Click the ASIO Settings button, then select your microphone from the list of devices, click Exit, and then click OK on the Preferences dialog. Close and then restart Premiere Elements.
Hardware Platforms
- Windows Setup Procedure
- Under START MENU open SOUNDS AND AUDIO DEVICES control panel.
- Select AUDIO tab; insure BLUE BALL USB MIC is selected as DEFAULT DEVICE.
- Click on VOLUME; select appropriate volume level.
- Exit control panel.
- Macintosh Setup Procedure
- 1. Open Apple menu -> SYSTEM PREFERENCES.
- Double-click SOUND preference file.
- Click INPUT tab.
- Double-click BLUE USB BALL MIC under CHOOSE A DEVICE FOR SOUND INPUT dialog box.
- Set input volume to the appropriate level.
- Exit SYSTEM PREFERENCES.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 47 more reviews...
 Updated Review -- I Had a Bad Unit June 16, 2006
Paul R. Potts (Ann Arbor, MI United States)
33 out of 42 found this review helpful
I wrote an earlier review of this product and panned it, titling my review "I Wish I Hadn't Bought It." This is an update. The Amazon site won't seem to let me change the star rating (I would now give it 4 stars), but I wanted to add my new comments.
NEW COMMENTS:
Shortly after writing the review I decided the "glitching" problem that occurred on two different computers, different versions of MacOS X, using different audio recording problems, and different destination drives just _had_ to be the microphone's fault. So I requested an RMA number from BLUE, giving them my long tale of woe. They accepted the return and turned it around quite quickly. In fact, although they said they could not reproduce the problem, they must have believed that I had tried everything reasonable to prove that the problem was in the mic, and sent me a new unit.
I'm happy to report that the new unit does not seem to exhibit the glitching problem at all. My first use for the new device was to record a violin concert put on by a friend of mine. I was not confident that the new mic would work, but I thought I would give it a shot anyway. I used the same battered PowerBook which had given me so much trouble with the previous mic. I am happy to say that the new mic performed beautifully. Not only was there no "glitching," but it seems to have a better noise floor. I think they did a slight redesign of the circuitry.
I tested it with both settings 1 and 3 (cardioid without a pad, and omni). The room was very "live" with polished wood paneling, giving a lot of reflection and reverb. Both settings sounded quite nice, just slightly different in the way they emphasized reflected sound arriving at the rear of the mic. In this particular case I liked hearing the extra room ambience, so I used the omni setting. The mic was several feet away, but the mic is very sensitive and gave me an extremely detailed and "up-close" reproduction of the instrument. You can close your eyes and, even with a mono recording, visualize the position of the bow, the hollow wooden sound of the instrument cavity, etc.
I would now recommend this mic, especially for the kind of application I just used it for. I applied a little compression and a peak limiter to the recording and the result was very musical and professional-sounding. That makes this mic actually quite a good deal as far as audio quality for the dollar.
I have not tested this unit for the same application that I used the original unit -- recording for podcasting. I suspect the lack of glitching and improved sound quality will give me greatly improved impression than the one I had before.
I am also quite pleased with BLUE's service and so I would consider buying other products in their line.
ORIGINAL COMMENTS
First off, this is a 16-bit, 44.1KHz device. 16 bit is considered "CD-quality," so that may not bother you, but that "CD-quality" sound is _after_ compression, mixing, and mastering. Trying to do good _tracking_ with a 16-bit audio stream as a is a challenge.
If you set the input level at full, if you talk or sing loudly, you'll get digital clipping earlier than you expect -- 16-bit audio doesn't give you a lot of headroom for peaks. Turn it down a bit, or use the omni or the cardioid capsule that includes a pad, and the overall level will be very low, and when you boost it to get an acceptable level for the final product, you'll get a lot of background noise too, unless you recorded in a dead-quiet studio.
Not background noise like the car honking outside your window, but background noise like the fluorescent light fixture, the air vent, or the hard drive of the computer you're recording to, even ten or fifteen feet away -- it's that sensitive, even in the lower-sensitivity cardioid setting, and picks up background noise very well. This is good for some applications -- it would work well for recording a choir where you want to hear the room reverb and the audience shifting in their seats and the person coughing in the back row -- but _not_ "perfect for podcasting," as it is being marketed.
In even a quiet office, to get a clean, loud voice recording with this microphone, you will have to immediately start working with compressors, noise gates or downward expanders, etc. This is fine if you're already an expert on that, but not so fine if you just want to record a podcast. Also, these tools are generally designed for 24-bit audio. The lack of headroom and reduced dynamic range of the 16-bit signal means that it is _considerably_ _harder_ to get a clean signal out of the plug-ins. I kept thinking "if only I tweaked the signal a little bit differently I could get a good voice signal," but the 16-bit signal just won't give you a professional-sounding result.
Now, the more debateable problem: glitches. Debateable because it is hard to conclusively pin these on the microphone; it could be that they would occur with a different USB audio device. But I mention it because I'm not doing anything very strange; my recording setup is about as simple as can be, and this is supposed to be a plug-and-play solution.
I originally bought this mic to use on a PowerBook G4/400 running Panther. I tried several different applications for recording, including Sound Studio and DSP Quattro. When recording on the PowerBook to an external FireWire drive, or USB drive, I inevitably got "glitches." The "glitched" audio would range from one word with bursts of noise in it to a three-minute segment completely decimated and unusable, sounding like it was a radio picking up tremendous static noise along with the signal. This meant after recording a 30-minute podcast, I would have to go back and do retakes on a dozen different sections. That suddenly turns a 30-minute recording project into a three-hour editing session.
I tried using a different external drive, a different FireWire cable, a different USB cable for the microphone -- same problem. I've seen the problem when trying to record at home, or at my office. I applied the firmware update available for the microphone -- it didn't help.
Recording to my PC worked, but I can't have the PC in the same room as the microphone; it is far too loud. Recording to the internal drive on my PowerBook G4 worked fine, but with a 10G drive, that isn't practical.
So, given that I had long wanted to replace my beat-up PowerBook G4/400, I _bought a new computer_ -- a Mac Mini G4/1.42. So far, I've tried recording only to the internal drive on that machine. I get the same problem. Out of a ten minute recording, I get three or four words which are "gliched." Zooming in on the bad audio with a sample editor, it is easy to see that a buffer was lost and repeated: a 512-sample region of audio is repeated, as if it were copied and pasted. This is because new audio did not arrive in time, so the previous contents of the buffer was used. You then get a "glitch" -- a burst of noise -- at the start and end of the buffer where the audio makes an instantaneous jump, something impossible for a speaker to do.
I can't _prove_ it is the microphone's fault, because it has recorded consistently to the internal drive of the PowerBook. But it is a big pain. At this point I wish I had not purchased it and had saved up for a conventional microphone and a separate audio interface. Working with this device has just been a distraction, source of frustration, and waste of my time. You might have better results -- but then again, you might not. I wish I had a solution that actually _worked_ reliably in the same price range, but I don't. I'm intending to save up for a full-blown "pro" recording interface, even though it will cost many times more. I give it two stars because if you absolutely can't afford anything else, you an probably get some kind of sound out of it.
 Impressive, clean cardiod sound, mac core audio, warm omni mode May 24, 2006
Matthew J. Rygelski (St. Louis, MO USA)
32 out of 32 found this review helpful
Okay, I own a lot of microphones. I am very picky when it comes to sound and I would gladly waste $40 in gas to return a microphone that just didn't have the sound I expect. I was delighted to hear the quality of this USB mic! It has a great clarity to it, without being "tinny" or "crispy", and without sacrificing on the lows either. No "boomy" or "hollow" sound, just a nice clean and full-range quality that I expect from my $500-range microphones (but thankfully, without having to fool with an audio interface or goofy proprietary driver software!) What a great find... plug it in and it is ready to record!!
If you are looking for an intelligent, clean, affordable microphone for voice-over projects, podcasts, quick-and-easy live recording (with your laptop, of course), or open-mic music composition before dragging all the gear out to record a full-blown multitrack, this is the best money can buy in this category. Not to mention, it looks great sitting on your desk! BLUE has definitely convinced me to buy again, solid construction and solid sound (and no stupid drivers like Samson's USB garbage). Maybe next I'll get a Bluebird or Baby Bottle, this company is worth a closer look now that I've heard the very smooth sound of their entry level -- BLUE has got my attention!!
This is a great microphone with a lot of options. November 20, 2005
Cesar G. Gamez (Dallas, TX)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful
When I started podcasting I began looking for a quality microphone that would provide me with quality sound while being inexpensive. This microphone has been GREAT for my podcasting efforts. There are three options: single vocal, live music, and a 360 degree vocal mic which allows me to share my microphone with other guests in the room without loosing sound quality.
In fact, I once did a podcast outside by the freeway and the outside noise was minimal. This is a great buy.
Comes with nothing February 3, 2006
God Bless America (Pensacola, FL)
14 out of 34 found this review helpful
The mic performs OK, but be prepared-- the thing comes with just what you see- bare microphone only. No way to support it unless you buy a stand. No usb cord with it (can you say 89 cents?). The manual is filled with clever quotes and puns, but light on useful technical info.
Great Stuff for Personal Recording December 17, 2006
T SANTOSO (Surabaya, Jatim Indonesia)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
I have a radio talk program that I recorded regularly. When I started 4 years ago, I have to go to the station to do voice recording. About 2 years ago I bought a profesional mixer with microphone and do all the recording at home with my PC. 6 months ago I read some review and bought Samson C01 and the Blue Ball. I connect to my IBM Thinkpad X60 and the result is very good. I prefer the Blue compare to Samson. I used it for radio talk show and record it at home, or during my extensive seminar traveling.
I believe that the quality is 95% similar to my -profesional- recording that I used to have. I love technology! ;-)
One thing that I don't really like is the size of the ball, haha it is a litle bit too bulky for my traveling need. I need a smaller microphone with similar quality.... But it is a small price to pay. And some people will also argue that The Blue LOOKS COOL !!! I agree...
If you need to do some sort or recording, this is a great stuff to use. And i saw that the price goes down too... good value.
I live in Indonesia, a bit problem to try some new stuffs that i see emerging. I will try some other microphone next time I travel to USA and buy them. I need smaller size, good quality microphone. and The Blue is a dream microphone for this time.
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