- Monitor or aux outs that will consist of 1/4″ TRS female or XLR male sockets, although they might only be able to give you 1/4″ TS (unbalanced).

- A tape out that might consist of female phono plugs.

The balanced (TRS or XLR) connections offer you better sound quality but you can’t plug them directly into a laptop — you’d need an audio interface like the Apogee Duet or something. This would give you the best possible audio quality.

If your laptop has a 1/8″ stereo audio input, which I think is the most likely scenario, then the sound is not going to be that great. You will have to work with the TS or phono outputs, provided you have the appropriate cables. It’s always the damned cables. You’ll need a two-TS-male-to-1/8″ TRS stereo male, or a two-phono-male to 1/8″ TRS stereo male, and it would be a good idea to have assorted gender changers in case they have something you’re not expecting. The quality you will get out of this setup is a little lower — and you will have to watch your input levels set very carefully to prevent clipping.

In all honesty, if you’re going to go with your laptop mic input, you would probably get better sound quality by just asking if they have a cassette deck hooked up in their rack somewhere — there is a good chance they do — and bring 3 or 4 hours of good tapes. You’ll have to flip tapes to make sure you don’t lose anything, though. I have the setup to digitize the resulting tapes if you want help with that.

Another option I’ll throw out there — I have my Sony PCM-D50 which I used for the Pontiac show. That is a high-quality recorder. If you want to borrow it and they will let you plug this in to the sound board, you could probably get better results than with either cassette or a typical laptop sound card. You will still have to watch levels a bit. This will only work if you have 1/4″ TS or the phono plug outputs (it is unbalanced consumer-level stereo in). I would have to get the raw audio files off the recorder and send them to you later.

Alternately, the recorder has good built-in mics so you could use those to get the full venue sound, like I did for the Pontiac show, but the results you’ll get will depend heavily on where you are seated (I recorded the Pontiac show from way in the back, and it shows in the resulting recording.

I would record it myself but I have already volunteered to sell merchandise or do whatever else a minion needs to do.

You should visit some time. Sing a couple of songs. I’ll bake cookies. Please? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?

I mean, wouldn’t it have been easier to put it in the opening paragraph.