Allright now don't laugh at my Blaster PC

[jjazz]

A while ago I bought a Blaster PC because it gave me the cheapest solution to upgrading an AWE32 and a possibly failing system. Now I was never that great on the AWE32 but I did have some fun in Cakewalk HS 5.0 writing some midi and throwing on a couple of guitar and vocal D/A tracks. So I figured this system with the Live Platinum would allow me to hunt down some bigger and more decent sounding sound fonts for midi and also had to give me better audio than the AWE32. That I reasoned coupled with a PIII 900 and 256k RAM for a bit more than $400 was the answer to my bad system and lack of $.
I know there aren't too many fans of the Live, and yeah I know, you get what you pay for, but shouldn't I be able to do some pretty decent D/A tracks of recording on this. I'm not that fussy my old AWE32 was working for me.
System:
PIII 900 w\SB LIVE Platinum on the board, now 512 RAM, 10g HD (I think 7200rpm) Win98SE
I'm using Cakewalk Sonar and recording vocals, and electric and acoustic guitars through a "Joe Meek VC3" with an "Oktava 219" condenser mic into the SB Live line in

Questions:
1) Does anyone know if in the future I can add a better card for audio yet still have the (onboard)SB Live active for MIDI and if so is there a decent enough one around $200? Or would money be spent better elsewhere?
2) What drivers should I be running? (WDM ? I've also heard of EMU having some)
(I haven't really had any problems yet, a few drop-outs with about 6-8 A/D tracks)
3) Is there a min for my line in recording volume that I should not go below to get a good strong (clean as possible) signal? Or should I just set up the Joe Meek and go as low as I have to to keep from clipping in Sonar?
4) Could I sneak by with an old pair of Advent speakers (I think nice in their day) for monitors if I get some sort of power amp to patch them through. I'm still working on getting good full recorded wav files but mixing is coming and all I've got is headphones and a mini 3pc Camb Soundworks set.
5) This is still just a family computer but no one really taxes it's resources but me with this hobby so any tweaking ideas anyone has would be welcome. As you can see $ is tight and I am cheap bear that in mind.
Thanks in advance for your time and sorry for the long post, jjazz

 

[SPINSTERWUN]

1) Yes you can add a better soundcard ) can you say Delta 66), and still use the SB in tandem with thew new card.

http://www.midiman.net

2) That depends on the programs you are using. If you do get a Delta series card you'll need this WDM link.

http://www.midiman.net/m-audio/html/dr/drdelta.htm

If you are on a budget,you should check out this freeware/shareware site.

http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/

3) You should want to come into the card as "HOT" as possible. But, for more info, I'll let somebody else answer this question for you. Ask Bruce from Blue Bear Sound or Sojko2, etc..

4) THERE IS NO WAY AROUND THE FACT THAT YOU WILL NEED GOOD MONITORS. Sorry, but that fact is very,very,very important.


5) You might need to do this...

http://www.techadvice.com/specs/answer.asp?aid=182

I hoped that I could be of some help to you.

spin

p.s. If you like SoundFonts then check these sites out...

http://thesoundsite.ismi.net/

http://www.hammersound.net/ (goto their links page )

http://www.mgermani.net/soundfonts.html

 

[RWhite]

I think Spin covered all the bases really well.

I'll add one thing to #5 - an easy way to get a bit more speed out of your system. It may be made redundant by the techadvice article.

Go into Control Panel / System / Performance / File system / Hard Disk. It will proably be set to "desktop computer". Change it to "Network File Server". This will simpley increase the hard disk cache. Then reboot.

Beyond that just don't install any more software than you need to. Game can be tricky because they like to install Direct X componants, which a lot of Music software rely on as well.

 

[jjazz]

Thanks Spin + RW

All very useful stuff.
RW I was running as a desktop so I've tried that but haven't rebooted yet. Also my kid has been throwing tons of his old games on here and I have supected that he could have dumped some older DX drivers in place of mine. Can I check what is installed? It may be time to throw something together for him and format this HD just to clean it up.
Spin thanks for the links I just love that stuff. I saw that techadvice post the other night did it and it seems to have made a difference. That kind of helpful stuff made me want to register and post here. I'll be taking your advice and try to call on these fellas about the line input volume and I've already started chasing down your links, thanks again.
Also I don't know if you use soundfonts yourself but I've gotten some nice instruments for my bank at this site, it has good little info text to give you an idea of each file.

http://soundfontcentral.blessedhope...Complete+Listing&OrderBy=SFName&Form=Complete
Thanks jjazz