Hallo, Louis Acresti hat gesagt: // Louis Acresti wrote: > I've been lurking on LAU for a few months now and I've finally managed > to come up with something worth asking: > I'm looking for an affordable external sound card for music > production. What are your recommendations? > Being a novice, I'm having trouble finding what I "need" (and I'm > growing wary of google's pagerank system...) so I thought I'd query > the real experts. ;-) > > I try to keep my options open, but there are some things I prefer: > -It should be a hell of a lot better than the crappy onboard AC'97 > sound I use right now (SNAP-CRACKLE-POP) > -It should be external: USB or Firewire or otherwise are all OK (I'll > be using it with my desktop now, but I plan on setting up a laptop for > music some time) > -It should be affordable: I can always make exceptions here > (especially since I'm not very familiar with this type of hardware), > but I'd prefer if it were around $200 USD or less. > -It should be *exceptionally* functional with Linux and JACK. > (Naturally, this is best proven through experience) > -Although the above should cover this, it ought to work with my > Novation X-Station synthesizer (which already works great through USB > with JACK) This is a Midi synth, isn't it? Then your soundcard won't interfere with it too much. Basically you have three options: PCI/PCMCIA as Carmen mentioned, Firewire or USB. The least expensive solution would be USB and it also will be the one, that is the easiest to setup. Practically all USB soundcards on the market work plug and play with current Linux distributions. Check http://qbik.ch/usb/devices/ for recommendations. I'd say avoid M-Audio USB soundcards, popular cards include the Terratec PHASE26 or the cards by Edirol. You will be limited in the amount of channels, generally only 8 mono channels in CD-quality are possible with USB1.1. Firewire is a bit trickier to set up as it's still quite new, requires rather current versions of various pieces of software, and you have to be more careful what to buy as some cards aren't supported yet (some never will be). So it depends, on how familiar you are with solving Linux-problems and how much time you want to invest. If you want to make music quickly instead of doing system administration then buy a USB card. Personally I would consider to buy a real PCI card for the desktop. They aren't expensive: decent cards with the ICE-chipsets (like the Delta cards by M-Audio) start at about 70 Euro for stereo cards, and they will give better performance than USB or FW. Plus you will save a lot of time by not having to change your setup at home all the time. Ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__
