External Soundcard?

[Envy The Pea]

Can anyone tell me if there's such a thing as an external soundcard? I have the use of a laptop from my employer that I have at home on weekends. Would like to use it to add to my home recording setup-- but I don't want to have to install hardware or reconfigure it drastically. Any hope for me along this line?

 

[crankz1]

Yeah .... there are all kinds of external soundcards.
Take a look at Zzounds for USB, FireWire and PCMCIA.
There will be some amount of configuring/driver installation that you will need to perform to said laptop though. This is true for any audio device.

 

[jake-owa]

Can anyone tell me if there's such a thing as an external soundcard? I have the use of a laptop from my employer that I have at home on weekends. Would like to use it to add to my home recording setup-- but I don't want to have to install hardware or reconfigure it drastically. Any hope for me along this line?

Get a firewire recording interface. I did and after some troubles I got it working nicely with the laptop. I even have the onboard sound working with it so there's nothing but some software added to the machine. This is also my business computer.
The best thing to do is create another user in the XP control panel (assuming it's windows) and use that for recording.
Man, there are so many usb and firewire interfaces to choose from.

 

[dgatwood]

Can anyone tell me if there's such a thing as an external soundcard? I have the use of a laptop from my employer that I have at home on weekends. Would like to use it to add to my home recording setup-- but I don't want to have to install hardware or reconfigure it drastically. Any hope for me along this line?

I thought about being a grammar nazi and saying "no, there's no such thing as an external card, but you can get an external audio interface," but alas, too many people had already posted, so it just wouldn't have been funny.

USB and firewire audio interfaces both exist. Firewire tends to be more reliable on the whole, IMHO, while USB tends to be cheaper.

 

[Envy The Pea]

This is good to hear! Cheaper may have to win out for now... I'm spending way more on this hobby than my wife would like. It's always one more little thing! Thanks for the feedback everyone! Gotta go shopping! --Nv

 

[cpc]

usb is also more universal if you wanted to use your soundcard on another computer ever, you can almost guarantee any computer will have a usb port...where as firewire is less common. then again its not too difficult to add a firewire port if you needed one.

 

[Envy The Pea]

I'm such a ditz! After I went to the zzsounds website, following crankz1's link, I realized what I was looking at was something I already owned! I've had a Tascam US-428 sitting in my closet for a least 5 years (seems than long, anyway). I bought it to do my recording on my imac, then went a different direction with a stand-alone br-1600 multi-tracker. Looks like I'll have both now. Now I just need to get access to an updated driver and software... the US-428 came with a copy of cubase, I believe. But I'm thinking of trying the N-tracks software. Thanks again for all the responses.