what sound card for midi music recording synthesizers

Well, he does say that he also wants to have MIDI and to be able to record his music.

The creative cards are not that bad for doing that at all.

As a temporary solution for me, I knocked up a PC wit ha Live Drive just for that, because the Audio from my Keyboards, Drum Machines, Sampler are all analog and these go into my mixer, but the Audio from my Atari FDI unit ( for the D2D HD ) is digital. I have the Analog and the digital both going into the Live Drive and I have selected the "What U Hear" option and using Nero's WAVE Editor, I record the music that way...

Cheesy but effective.

Above all, its cheap.

As for your 3 answers, Im at a loss as to how the hell you can say such garbage and actually believe it? Im not even going to quote you because its such an idiotic post.
 
The lack of flexibility in terms of upgrading Macs is the biggest deal breaker for me personally. I found that my 2006 Mac pro couldn't handle my Logic projects/PT sessions @ 96kHz /24-bit. I know that at higher samplerates and bit-depth such as these the computer is going to be put under immense strain but unfortunately with a Mac, it is not a simple case of buying a new motherboard, cpu and memory. I upgraded my Mac with seperate Samsung F3 drives, more apple branded Hynix memory to no avail. When you look at buying a logic board (aka motherboard) for the macs they retail on the bay for £500+, let alone the CPU (s - I had 2) and the memory. At the end of it all, you might as well have bought an entirely new system!

As for you - I think that hurling abuse like that is infinitely more idiotic and counter-productive than my post. I was stating my point of view drawn from a history of owning macs and having this problem. I wasn't in any way trying to insult your opinion on the matter (or indeed devalue it in any way) as I was simply stating from MY experiences. What exactly has calling me an idiot helped in terms of pushing forward this thread for TheNemesis? Funny, I would have expected something a little more constructive from someone with more than 7,000 posts.

Maybe you're just having a bad day or something?

Either way, please don't throw comments like that around at me or anybody else - it just serves to unbalance what should be an open platform of people sharing ideas and helping each other out, by passing on thoughts and ideas expressed from a knowledgeable standpoint. Surely?
 
Hell I must be. I will take it back.

Ok, each has experiences with Macs in the musical field.

I have, for my own experiences, found that the PC was very unstable when it comes to keeping a perfect SMPTE timecode and the Mac and indeed even an 8 Mhz Atari ST were both superior to the PC in this respect.

Now, as for Midi, this is the same thing - the PC was all over the place with slowing down and speeding up all the time... Yes, by minute ammounts, but by enough to hear it, while this never happens on a Mac or Atari.

And I use my Atari for Disrect to Disk recording and I have access to 64 Tracks of this, plus 64 Tracks of Midi with my Atari but I never lose a single bit of information and yet on the PC I found this to be a very problematic...erm... Problem?

Similarly with the Mac. Whenever I have done anythign with the Mac, I have found it to be flawless in every respect, and since the Mac did everythign I asked of it when I did use it, I felt that there was never any need to upgrade.

So, ok, we are coming at things from a completely different angle and for that, I appologise. I simply should not have said what I did.

As for the need to upgrade, my Falcon originally started life with 16MB RAM and a 16Mhz 68030 CPU and while this is all that is needed for use with CuBase Audio, I myself simply cannot hack how slow it is when dealing with tons of data and so mine is now a 68060 @ 90Mhz with 256+16MB but its still a 20 year old machine, so upgrading is not always going to be, a be all and end all cure.

Besides, the Atari platform is dead now, so why the hell am I even bringing that one to the table?
 
Yes I agree

Macs are vastly superior for music work for the reasons you have stated.

Also, lets not forget how stable the drivers are for the interfaces and Core Audio's general reliability as an audio platform or Mac OS X's general speed and flexibility through Terminal etc.

All that I am trying to say is, if you have the time (and willpower!) look into putting Mac OS X on a pc - I have had nothing but fantastic success with it and frankly the system runs my projects far better than the Mac Pro which it replaced (and for £500 less!).

Don't get me wrong I am a strong advocate of macs to but in my personal situation where I needed more processing horsepower and DSP building a hackintosh was the best thing for me to do.

P.S Thanks for the apology Rakoon I find your posts informative and interesting I can only hope I can return the favour ;)
 
hughythomas said:
P.S Thanks for the apology Rakoon I find your posts informative and interesting I can only hope I can return the favour ;)
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We got off on the wrong foot. No need to thank me, I should never have shot my gob off... I have done that a few times so you aint the first I have annoyed and wont be the last.

But then, its sometimes good to have a heated debate because what one person think is cruddy, the next person might defend it to the death and the people looking in can get both sides of the arguement and will make a better, more informed decision ( or lose the plot totally and buy an Atari LOL )
 
3dcandy said:
alos, having a mixer would be beneficial...one with built in fx like reverb good!
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Most of the Reverb FX can be done via midi... I try to use Chorus / Reverb / Brightness etc as well as I can to avoid the need of mixing it afterwards....

My main input Keyboards are a Yamaha CS1X and an Edirol PCR300
 
FatRakoon said:
Most of the Reverb FX can be done via midi... I try to use Chorus / Reverb / Brightness etc as well as I can to avoid the need of mixing it afterwards....

My main input Keyboards are a Yamaha CS1X and an Edirol PCR300
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Of course you can, but that's not going to help him recording synths etc. is it? Or if he wishes to add vocals. I'm not arguing the point, but I'm slowly coming round to getting some hardware back as it just works when you push the on button instead of weird obscure software issues that always seem to crop up. I believe a nice blend of hardware and software is the way to go for me...best flexibility and performance, and even when I play live, the amount of crashes/problems has decreased about 100 fold...
 
The best sounding algorithymic verb I have heard recently has been this one by Virsyn:

http://www.virsyn.de/en/E_Products/E_REFLECT/e_reflect.html

It's a native plug which sounds like a high end convolution for 169 Euros. Bit of a bargain in my opinion.

Also there are the obvious ones like Altiverb and PSP Easyverb etc. Even Cubase 5's new Reverence plug sounds fantastic although don't even try and run it @ 96kHz it will literally have a baby!

@ Subbass We literally bastardised an old Stagg rackmount stand I had (just cut it up) and housed it in birch box. I was suprised it came out as good as it did to although if you look at my control room you can see I got F all space in there so custom was the only way to go really. Not that I am complaining!

Lastly, as I am an 'in the box' man now - I would HIGHLY recommend the UAD-2 dsp cards. I have a UAD-2 Solo 32 Nevana and it comes with 32 tracks of Neve 88RS, UAD1176, Pultec EQ etc etc all perfectly modelled from the original racks. So much so that the top guys are now just selling their originals as they are too expensive/too much hassle to maintain. You have to hear these plugins to believe them!

http://www.uaudio.com/products/uad/uad2soloneve/index.html

EDIT: Oops re the mixer Subbass its not actually a mixer mate - its a combo of 2x Euphonix control surfaces namely the MC Mix on the left and the MC Transport on the right. They simply physically screw together and control your DAW with motorized faders etc. They do absolutely NO audio processing just purely to get an 'analogue' feel to your audio production when using purely comuter based audio production. I did have a huge Soundcraft analogue desk from the 90s up untill 2 months ago but moved 'in the box' to try and save space and negate some of the A/D - D/A conversion which was degrading my audio. Audio now simply comes into my interface from the Audient pre and has only ONE stage of conversion (unlike before where I had literally 4). This has increased the sonic quality of what I do tenfold and I am really happy with the end results!
 
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