New Soundcard for music production?

3dcandy

3dcandy

3dcandy

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Hi all,
I am finally getting all my stuff sorted, and was thinking of building a rack mounted pc for audio production. Big question is, what soundcard? Will be used with a selection of vsti's, Ableton Live Suite 8, and basically I'm interested in something that will be fairly cheap (£100 max ish) and with low latency for use in my live sets. A rock solid set of drivers to be used with Windows 7 x64 would be a massive boost, but as I've been out of sound hardware a while I'm a bit stumped!

Cheers in advance!
 
that was one card I was looking at, can get one b-grade from digital village for under £50. or ******s for like £80. ocuk don't seem to have anything great in at moment
 
bit of both to be really honest...I have a mix of hardware and software and keyboard, just a rack mounted pc for only music would be great optomised for music and nowt else...
 
M-audio is a good card, but the Windows 7 support is more of an afterthought so may be worth a mention reading up a little on their drivers before commiting to a purchase.

I'm using an ESI Maya 44 and have found it to be excellent. It's quiet, has good ASIO drivers and not had any problems with it since ditching a faulty motherboard making me think the card / drivers were faulty.
 
PistolPete said:
M-audio is a good card, but the Windows 7 support is more of an afterthought so may be worth a mention reading up a little on their drivers before commiting to a purchase.
Click to expand...

Got the following:

RME Fireface 800
MOTU 828MKII
M-Audio Firewire Solo
M-Audio Audiophile 2496

None of the M-Audio interfaces have ANY problems with Win 7 x64 that I have seen. I use these professionally on a day to day basis without a single hiccup. You sure you were running the latest drivers?

As for the OP, can you be a bit more specific please? For your budget I think the 2496 would be the best bet although I would recommend spending a bit more as in the long run, it will pay dividends. What style of music will you be recording if at all? Ie. are you working with real recorded live audio? Or simply samples?

Need some specifics... :D :D

Tom
 
Hi Tom,
I have a half hardware, half software setup...ie. 2 x Akai samplers for the samples (or can use ableton if needed) about 5 hardware keyboards depending on what I take. the stuff I'll be playing however makes a lot of use of soft synths, arturia mainly with prophet-v, cs-80, minimoog, moog modular and jp-8's in most mix's. because a lot of the stuff I play is in amr jarre/tangerine dream/ymo vein analogue synth emulations are the way to go!
 
Know its not really a pro card, but when using ASIO in audio creation mode, my X-fi XtremeMusic can go as low as 64 samples without any hiccups. I'm really amateur when it comes to audio creation but it's definitely something I wanna explore further. :)
 
Yer can't really go wrong with a Audiophile 2496 then if you want a PCI card for your projects.

Obviously there are hella loads of different interfaces for different needs - do you need a controller for your DAW or? Maybe something integrated like the M-Audio Oxygen perhaps?

Otherwise if no controller is needed then 2496 should be fine - they sound surprisingly good for the cash with excellent conversion and sample accurate preamps/playback. Also they go very low in terms of buffer size even at the higher sample rates (presumably with all those fancy soft synths you'll only be working @ 44.1kHz / 16 bit right?).

Tom
 
hughythomas said:
Got the following:
You sure you were running the latest drivers?
Click to expand...

I had a Delta 1010 and after waiting ages for them to release working 7 x64 drivers I upgraded and found them unstable as hell. At the time my MIDISport had no drivers for Windows 7 at all.

Reading through the forums it still seems that there is "driver maintenance" going on to sort the outstanding issues people have with the Windows 7 drivers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking M-Audio as I've used their kit for a long time but they dropping the ball quite considerably with Windows 7.
 
Why cannot these companies release stable working drivers for Win7, surely they have had long enough? First Creative, then Asus, and it seems M-Audio are not fault free when it comes to drivers. Has Microsoft made it so awkward to produce stable audio drivers?
 
I'm seeing a lot of driver problems with windows 7 but nothing that can't be sorted....although I could fall back to good old XP if needed as this will be a new build I was gonna go with 7. Hugh I'd probably run a 16-bit/44100 or maybe stretch to 16/48000 but I doubt if I go much higher! Controller wise, Akai APC-20 or Novation launchpad plus my normal MIDI keyboards I reckon
 
I've never personally used a 1010 but one of my best mates had a very similiar style of setup to yours (in that he built a rack mounted PC around it to do mobile recordings). He really liked his 1010 and I have to say I was impressed when I saw his rig although I never actually HEARD it.

TBH if you're going down the route of rack interfaces on the cheap the Presonus Firepod (or the newer reissue called the 'FP10' & 'Firestudio') are very good. You can find a cheap second hand original Firepod through the usual places and this will serve you very well!

If you do go Firepod route be sure to right click the tray icon and go to CPU Setting -> High. It's not entirely obvious to begin with but you won't be able to get decent buffer settings without this clicked (I found this out the hard way haha!).

I'd also always recommend thinking about the higher sample rates - pretty much industry standard is 96 / 24 (or at least all the pro studios I've worked in use this generally on PTools). Although, as I work mostly with real live recorded audio - retaining the integrity of the original sound is absolutely paramount to someone like me and might not be so relevant to what you are doing?


I personally use Logic 9 (with mostly RME interfaces and Apogee/Audient converters) but whatever gets the job done eh?

Will you really need all the preamps on a Firewire audio interface like the 1010, Firepod or MOTU gear? I still need some specifics over what you are trying to achieve to really give you some good advice over what to buy...
 
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