Guillemot ISIS

M

Mixer

New member
Hi everybody!

I'm new to this forum. Myself in a few lines: I live in Galicia (Northeast of Spain), played bass guitar for ten years and now I'm starting my life in the tracks;o)

I want to set up a good (but as cheap as possible) home estudio and I'm about to bought a CPU with the following components:

- AMD 1400 (I think it's an Athlon)
- 512 mB RAM
- HD 28 GB
- Guillemot ISIS

The price for the CPU is 300 € ( about 300$). I think it's quite good but I don't know how good (or bad) is the ISIS

Anyone can tell experiences with this card? Problems, advantages; how good is the 8 track recording... Anything would be very helpful

Thank you :o)
 
Obviously the computer you are buying is running windows Me or earlier as the Isis only supports up to ME. You will be restricted to only using ME as Guillemot stopped supporting the card years ago.
Also on the downside is that the card is only 18bit and has pretty poor latency figures (i think the best i was able to achive is about 49 ms). which renders it pretty useless for live midi work if you plan on using VSTIs. If you use its own 94b format then near 0 latency can be achieved. which is the way I used to do it. compose in 94b and render using vstis etc..

The plus side is that the for all its negatives it was a really good card as it made pretty musical sounding recordings, has the ability to record 8 simultaneous tracks and had s/pdif AND even had its own built in sampler.

Also a tip.. the only way that I could figure out how to get the software sampler sounds recorded as wave files was to use a cable from the s/pdif output to the s/pdif input (use standard 38ohm digital style cable) on the breakout box itself. couldn,t figure no other way.

I say go for it at the price you are paying as it will be a good intro into the world of home recording. There are all sorts of issues with compatibility of chipsets etc, but the bottom line if the machine you are buying has the isis installed and working properly then it should have all been sorted for you.

you can use the computer as a launch for a future upgrade. Or set a dual boot system if you get another sound card. Also when I upgraded to a hootech c-port sound I had both Isis and C-port happily living side by side and in logic audio could see somthing like 18 inputs. Which was nice but kind of unneccesary as I have never needed more than 8 inputs at any one time.

go for it.
 
I didn't think they made harddrives that small anymore, you might think about getting either a bigger one some time soon, seeing as space can go rather quickly. WOW $300... is that just for the CPU? It might be worth it to have someone over here in the USA buy it and ship it to you, for that price you could get AMD XP 3200 (of course you'd have to get different RAM and Mainboard)!
 
Isis Guillemont

Mixer, and all:
I have an ISIS. I use it in a two soundcard set-up on a win98 machine.
My other card is a SB Audigy. Both have break-out boxes that I velcro
to the top of cpu case so everything is handy. I like the ISIS because
it lets me do quick recordings of multiple inputs. I use Cool Edit Pro in
a multitrack view. Cool Edit sees all the ISIS inputs and outs. So,
I can use all 8 inputs (4 stereo) and in Cool Edit I can assign each
input to a seperate track, or if I want to plug in an outside stereo
source to record along, I just use one of stereo pairs (1,2) (3,4). etc.
I tried using e-magic. Now I'm not an idiot, but that software is so
whacked out, its not funny. My advice is use this card with Cool Edit
Pro, and you will have great success. But again, I would not waste my
time (and believe me I have) with the ISIS software, or the E-tragic
software!
 
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