Is every hardware usb pc interface compatible with all software recording programs?

[junplugged]

or is there specific compatiblity issues?

Also, I was looking at some Cubase stuff in a store and the guy was showing me a piano roll, a mixer screen, and I was thinking, I've seen all that stuff in Voyetra in 1988.... How different can all these packages be? Or is it like word processing where eveyone has a table, spell check, tabs, margins, bold, fonts, columns, mail merge, help, pagination, auto correct, auto complete, etc. And it's just a little different way to access the same features.

Do people really dig deep before deciding or do they just go w/ something cheap or free (like n-track and PT free) or, do they learn this stuff in school somewhere?

 

[minofifa]

i think with soundcard interfaces, more importantly than the hookup like USB, firewire or PCI, the compatiblity issues to look for are driver type, bit depth, sample rate etc. It is important for a piece of hardware to offer good driver support like ASIO, WDM and MME.

As for picking the software, you just read around these forums for a little while and you quickly see what everybody is using and at what level. For me, i noticed to get something a little better than homestudio quality in software, my choices were protools, nuendo, sonar, cubase, logic. Nuendo is too expensive, protools requires their hardware, logic is only for mac, cubase eats ass , so i'm left with sonar. I didn't know too much about it when i got the demo, but i learned it and purchased it later on. If i could do it again, i would take a serious look at traction and vegas but i don't think they are on the same level as sonar and cubase.

I was just kidding about cubase sucking, it is pretty much equal to sonar in features and is slightly more expensive. I just like the layout of sonar and the customer support of cakewalk better.

 

[Jim Y]

Under the hood, there are significant differences between the various packages. I would definately recommend researching carefully before a major purchase of hardware or software. Personally I would pick an interface that has the broadest support, but there are cases where you must be limited in choice to get the maximum compatabilty if there is a brand that you definately must have - Digidesign and ProTools being an obvious example.

You really can't assume hardware A will work with software B. I recently got caught out trying to help someone with an E-magic 6|2 usb interface with Adobe Audition (Cool Edit Pro). He needed 6 inputs for recording and on the face of it, the interface fitted the bill. Audition doesn't support ASIO but the device had the required MME drivers. As it turned out, the MME drivers were not suitable. They had designed the driver as a single multichannel instead seperate driver channels and Audition could only see one stereo input. Personally, I thought that was a thing of the past - it was common with older Win95/98 drivers but this was the first time I'd heard of it with modern WDM drivers for WinXP!

I for one managed to get a feel for the various sequencers without paying for them myself first, and there was a little less choice and commonality then. Some of my decisions were negative - I bought brand B because brand A was crap! There are I think, fewer bug-ridden things out there now - it's really a case of matching features to your needs. However, what you think you want and what you end up needing can change.

My first idea was for a DAW that simply replaced multitrack tape and be used in exactly the same way - rather soon this vision turned up-side down once I'd understood what a computer based DAW can achieve, and I started using and wanting all the other stuff like virtual instruments.

I wouldn't like to bet on it, but I think it was either Cubase or Notator that introduced the sequencer look we now seem to have in everything with their products for the Atari ST. There are some with different ideas such as Ableton Live, but few.

 

[lpdeluxe]

Well put, Mr Y. The truth is that most of us with stable systems are not using our original hardware OR software OR, in at least my case, original operating system...in fact, the only thing I've got left from my setup 4-1/2 years ago is the computer case! Do the best you can when you start out, but expect to evolve (unless you're a creationist, in which case you're stuck with whatever cheese you got the first time around).

Jim Y's point about working differently with computers vis-a-vis tape machines is quite important: for me it was the epiphany required before I could really record digitally.

 

[junplugged]

Wow, great responses. I had a feeling it wasn't so easy and that there maybe protocol and interface standards, but not as much compatibility between software, hardware, file types, and ui's.

But this sure seems like the place to dig into it. I'm going to start off really simple and just try some editing not recording just yet, and test the pc and try to optimize it.