My Analog mic won't pick up sound..help

hey guys im writing this cuz im pretty much stuck where I'm at and can't figure out how to get this mic to work..

I have a shure pg58 analog mic(dynamic)

I bought a xlr-to-usb cable so I could record music on my laptop..it said it could plug n play...so i plug and it doesn't play.. microsoft downloaded software when I plugged the usb in, and it recognizes that it's plugged in however the sound levels don't register when talking into it.

any advice you could provide would be very helpful. thank you.

It could be that your input signal is just far too low in volume to be recognized by the meter. Try boosting the input signal as far as you can go in your DAW of choice (smash a couple of maximizers on the bus since just raising the fader probably won't help much) and check if you can hear anything then. If there's still no sound then idk, but if there is then that's possibly a bug in your OS. Extremely low volume on mic input is a known and common bug in Windows XP, and maybe for whatever OS you're running, too. There's no fix to it in XP to my knowledge, but there might be one for your OS. Oddly enough, reinstalling XP doesn't help either. Also, under volume settings there's a checkbox for "Mic boost" or something like that, make sure that one is checked, though, if you have the same bug as I, that option probably won't be available to you. The only two ways around this that I know of are a) getting a new computer, and b) getting a pre-amp to boost the signal before it reaches your computer (or well you could use dozens of maximizers on your input bus to boost the signal but that eats a lot of CPU...).

I might be wrong and that's not the issue, but it's definitely worth a try in my opinion. Good luck, mate!

double post ftl...

thanks for the input, I have checked all mic settings on both windows and the program im using to record, each are at 100%. Im running windows 7 so it shouldn't be a pc performance issue, I've heard about the preamp thing u mentioned but from what I've read elsewhere this doesn't need it.

maybe the problem is that im converting it to usb and not a 1/4 to 3.55mm.. thats the only other thing I can think of.

you may need ASIO sound drivers... check out ASIO4ALL... most usb mics require that, so it's likely your usb adapter does too... then you'll need to be sure your program is configured to use the ASIO4ALL and the specific usb port for the input...