What Sound Card is best for my needs?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Aspect
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Aspect

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Alrighty, Im sure this question has been posed something like 50000 times prior to this particular post and answered just as many, but, Im not one for breaking new ground. =]

Bascily, I need some advice on a relatively inexpensive soundcard/breakout box combo for Home Recording uses. I myself am a Hip-Hop producer and, strictly as a hobbie, a vocalist as well. My beats I sell though, So i need something thats gonna give me solid overall quality and be flexable along the way. I play guitar live on alot of my beats, as well as live keyboard overdubs in addition to the normal sequence rig-ama-role. So I need something that will perform well under those situations as well. I dont really need anything capable of complex routing or massive simultanious (I'm not even gonna try to spell that word.) Track playback/record or anything like that.. In general, when I do a song, its pretty straight forward, Instrumental gets run in, I playback and record guitar if Im using it, then play the whole mix back and toss on any live keyboards, then lay vocals. Simple, pretty basic situation.

Im looking at a, give or take 50$, a 350$ price range. Below all this I'll list my computer specs and other hardware I intend to use as I'm sure thats important. I would like to thank anyone who has read this far now though, and I do appreciate your time and help!


The Computer: (more or less homemade)

800mhz AMD K6
256 Megs of RAM
25 Gig HD
Running Windows 98 2nd edition
GEForce Somethingorother GFX card..
-As far as the software Im going to be using to record, I havent decided yet, Im leaning towards Reason, or maybe Logic Audio..-

The Gear:

AT 4033 Mic, as well as a wonderfully cheap radioshack deal and one SM57.
Alesis Masterlink for final Mastering and cutting to CD
ASR-10 as primary Key-board in the rig


K, thats pretty much it I think.. Also, on a side note, Ive noticed while looking around at cards, very few in my price range (any at all?) have XLR inputs for my mics.. That would mean Id have to convert to 1/4 Cable correct? What kinda loss in quality am I looking at?

K, thats it, this book is done. Booya! Thanks !!!!!!
 
The Audiophile is a nice card (I have one as well) but there is no breakout box though - all connections are right on the card.

A couple suggestions though about the rest of your set up:

-Up your RAM to at least 512Mb, you won't be sorry you did so.
-Get a bigger HD (at least 40Gb)
-Consider an upgrade to XP or 2000
-If you haven't bought it yet, definetly stay away from Logic. EMagic is discontinuing all software support for the PC platform and will be a Mac exclusive software house. Don't waste your money on something that has no future in terms of upgrades/updates and most importantly support.
 
Hi Aspect,

Brzilian's suggestions are pretty much on the money:
1) More RAM definitely, 512MB is really the go. Less than that and your sysytem will struggle. You'll get a lot of audio glitches too.

2) Bigger & faster HD - 7200rpm, especially for audio. You could have a second HD in your PC specifically for your audio & sequencing apps.

3) As for the OS upgrade, Slackmaster2K recommends Win2000, Brzilian finds XP stable and I use 98SE and get along with it quite well.

4) Logic - avoid, Brzilian is spot on. CakeWalk Home Studio is well worth investigating. Alternatively consider Sonar. It's probably everything you need, though more expensive than HS.

Zzounds are currently selling the Terratec DMX6 Fire 24/96 for $250. It has a breakout box. No doubt there are other audio cards with similar breakout boxes, you'd have to do a Google search to find them though.

--
BluesMeister
 
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