Clueless

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Pyro

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Could someone please tell me the best possible Sound cards for recording. I want to buy the best for my computer so i dont have Latency problems
 
First start with a decent computer, the latency is more of a function of the machine and its drivers than the soundcard since it is the amount of time the computer needs to process the audio signal and spit it back out again
 
I agree with altitude but ultimately you need a decent soundcard as well as a properly spec'd and configured machine if you want decent sound quality and to avoid latency.

What's your budget and how many sources do you need to record simultaneously?
 
I have a ACER Athlon64 Laptop with 512mb RAM. I have been trying to record into Cakewalk with Drum Patterns from Fruity Loops and Guitar input from Guitar Port. I have tried loads of differant ASIO Drivers but every time i go to record over the Drums, it go's zzzzzzzzzt and cuts out half way through playing a Riff. Both Guitar Port and Cakewalk are set together as ASIO with Guitar Port as the Input and Playback Device (i have tried changing to these about but no luck). I just cant understand it unless its having trouble writting to my hard drive (maybe a new 2.5" Drive would help?).

Ultimately, the best thing i can think of doing is, get a Desktop with a Dual-Core 64, 2GB RAM and a top bollocks Sound Card. I was looking at the new X-FI Sound Blaster but according to this forum, Creative seems to be the one to avoid.

What is the best out there for no hastle recording?

I want the Mesa Boogie of the Sound Card world :)
 
Well I hate to harp on it as I have limited experience in professional or "prosumer" cards, but my EMU 1820 has latency times of less than 10ms with 12 tracks recording simultaneously. The ASIO drivers are rock solid as well.

I agree with the previous posts that latency timing is not based solely on the sound card, it's a total system thing. So you want a fast front side bus, low memory timings, lots of system memory, and good processor speed and cache. The Athlon 64 chips have a memory controller integrated into the processor as opposed to the motherboard, so they end up having about 33% faster memory accesss times than P4's. Also, the dual-core chips will probably have a slight advantage over the single-core chips, although I think that's going to be more for playback than recording.

Bottom line, you can build a really nice desktop from scratch for between $600 and $800, depending on how nice of a processor you want to get. And if my 3.0 P4 can get those nice low-latency numbers, those computers sure as hell will.
 
Pyro said:
I have been trying to record into Cakewalk with Drum Patterns from Fruity Loops and Guitar input from Guitar Port. I

There should be no soundcard invovlement in getting Fruity Loops and Cakewalk to work together - just insert FL as a DXi instrument.
 
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