[GloryUprising]

So my mom has been really getting into Cantonese Opera Singing and has been using my old college voice recorder which incidentally sounds like **** for her purposes. Currently, she just plays the background instrumentals out of a CD player and records herself singing into the voice recorder.
 
I know we got a few Audio-Video gurus in house 

 and I would like to ask you guys to recommend an easy to use setup that will allow my mom to record herself practice, and if possible have that recording be monitored over a preset track. Ideally this would interface with a computer that would also record the created track. 
 
My mom is not the most technologically minded (surprise i know!) so ease of use is the primary concern. This will be an xmas present and I would like to keep the whole setup under $500 (but this is flexible). Bare in mind I need the whole shebang Mic, cables, interface, software ect (she has a computer already tho).
 
I have the headphone part covered. =p
 
Thanks guys!

 

[Innos]

There are condenser microphones that plug directly into the computer using USB. They are easy to use, but usually not professional quality. However there's so many of them available these days I'm sure some of them are pretty good.
 
Those would be fine since all she really needs is an interface that would allow her to record one microphone. The monitoring could be handled by her computer sound card, as ASIO isn't crucial when recording only one source with a simple backing track.
 
I'm pretty sure almost any recording software available will be able to handle this situation, both free and mega expensive, but I've only used Ableton and Cubase so I can't help you there. I'm sure you could even make due with Audacity though.
 
However, since this is a gift and I know you'd probably like to be sure that everything works out of the box, I'm fairly certain you can get USB condensers that come with both recording software and a headphone out.
 
I'd try using your favorite search engine to find out which USB microphone's the most highly regarded for what you're willing to pay, but anything more than $100-150 is probably not necessary.