soundcards and soundfonts

[blue monkey]

I recently upgraded my PC to 2ghz 512 ram etc etc, running cubasis vst 4.0. I also brought a terratec EWX 26/96 soundcard, basically on the strength of its fast latency. However, being someone who relies on soundfonts for playing samples up and down the keyboard, i have had to keep my creative soundblaster live! card. I thought I would be able to make the soundfonts up using the Vienna programme, then trigger them using the EWX 26 (to make use of its faster latency). It seems though on getting everything up and running I can only trigger them from the live! card. Is there nothing I can do to get round this? Because I go from the sound card line out to the my amp, (my setup runs: out board synths - 8:2 mixer - computer running cubasis with soundfonts - amp) it suggest to me, unless i'm missing something, I can only use audio from one card. So if the EWX 26 really is out the question for triggering soundfonts does that render it completly useless, or can i least use it to trigger my external synths? I really want to use the EWX 26 all round for the fast latency please help!!!

 

[AlChuck]

The Vienna program is an editor for creating and editing Sound Fonts, but it's not a softsynth or Sound Font player per se.

You have a couple of basic choices:

You can use the MIDI synth(s) on the SB card and the audio on the Terratec independently. In my setup, I have my SB Live and Delta 66 cards run out to an external mixer, from which I drive the speakers. So I can hear the MIDI parts from the SB as I listen to the audio tracks from the Delta. When I want to turn the MIDI tracks into audio prior to mixing, I record them track by track to their own audio tracks using the SB's own recording device. Works fine. Some people route the output of the SB back into the audio ins of their other superior recording card, but I don't see the point in that unless you don't have an external mixer.

You can also get one or more of the several available softsynths that can load SoundFont files, such as LiveSampler. Then you can remove the SB Live from the equation. However, unless you have good WDM or ASIO drivers for the Terratec (depending on what recording software you are using -- ah, you said Cubase, so ASIO it would be), you will not be able to play the synths in real-time --though once you have recorded the MIDI data, it will play back just fine.

You seem to have a few misconceptions going on here, too. You refer to "faster latency" ("lower latency" is more correct), but there should be no latency issues with MIDI messages sent to either the SB card's on-board synth, or out either the SB's MIDI Out or the Terratec's MIDI Out (assuming it has one) to external synths. There is absolutely no advantage to using the Terratec to generate the MIDI parts other than the slight improvement in real-time quality while you play the MIDI parts themselves (that is, while they are still MIDI tracks) because of its (assumably) superior digital-to-analog converters compared to the SB's. But once you render the tracks to audio, either through re-recording them as audio via the SB's recording device or the Terratec's, they should be essentially identical. (If anything, recording them through the SB's own recording device should be marginally better, because you record them as data direct from the on-board chip that's playing the Sound Fonts, where if you run them out and back into the Terratec, you go through one digital-to-analog conversion from the SB and then through another digital-to-analog conversion on the Terratec's inputs