Suggestions for purchase.

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rahulmidi

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i want to know two important things before i purchase a USB midi controller keyboard.(49/61 key)
Q.1Do i need an audio interface to work with a USB midi controller keyboard and my laptop(i may use FL studio).
i wont be using any other instruments or devices at all(because i have less money). only a USB midi controller keyboard and a laptop(which has a USB port).If an audio interface is needed please mention what difference it will make.

Q.2i wish to make simple piano or synth or strings like sounds with some special effects.Please suggest me few important things to keep in mind or the things i need to look for before purchasing a midi keyboard.
thankyou.
 
You don't need an interface to use a Keyboard/Midi Controller. If the keyboard has a USB out you just need a USB cable. If the keyboard has Midi connectors you will need a Midi to USB cable. They're quite cheap.
 
As far as making the sounds you want, I'm not familiar with FL Studio and what it includes, but you will need VSTi's (virtual instruments) for the sounds and VST's (FX) for an effects you want to add. These are typically done as 'plug-ins' in DAWs (recording software.
Suggest you do a lot of reading before buying anything.
 
You can work without external audio interface but it is recommended to get one, because with the built in sound card the sound will be worse, and the latency will be bigger (even with asio4all) but if you have little money just buy the midi keyboard, you always can later get external sound card if aren't happy with the built in. About the keyboard, well you haven't say how much money you can spend on, so can't give you recommendation on that, but you must decide do you need a keyboard with a lot of knobs to make changes in real time, or need just a keyboard, and will make the changes after recording in the daw (in your case fl studio) you're working with. Good luck.
 
You can get small latency with built in sound card, but it all depends on your computer processing power. Hungry VSTi's and slow computer = no good.
 
Just spent the last 2hours with FL 7 demo.

I wanted to emulate the OPs' situation so I installed* it on my HP W7/64 laptop. There were some anomalies thrown up about 64bits but this often happens and you can usually ignore them.
However, FL 7 only worrked for a short time then I could not get it to play. I also wanted to use my Evolution Ekeys 49 keyboard into it to check the latency but no way could I get that to work! The fool software kept telling me I was out of memory whereas TMang' was telling me that I was only using 1.86G of the 4G on board!

So, have the FL F***kwits released a demo that will not run on a current OS? (I did get it working on XP SP3 on a P4) .

Note: Using the lappie's internal card Win wavetable gave noticeable latency but a neat sample program with the Evo called "Picture Book" gave no perceptable delay. This indicates to me that any decently fast PC will be fine for latency if you avoid Win wavetable.
*Got stung by a download site that insisted on installing a Registry cleaner. Much of the 2hours was spent getting rid!
Dave.
 
Dave, out of interest - why did you install FL 7? I mean this is pretty outdated, version 11 came just out...
 
Seidy said:
Dave, out of interest - why did you install FL 7? I mean this is pretty outdated, version 11 came just out...
Click to expand...

If you have a link to a CLEAN install of a demo of 11 I will give it a do!

Dave.
 
FL Studio

On the left side is download link from Image-line's own server. It should be as clean as it will get (ofcourse don't forget to untick unnessesary things when installing)
 
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