External Sound Card

[maffro]

Me again =D. Thanks to everyone who helped me out last time, I've all but decided on a Keystation 88 so far as buying a midi controller goes. But I'mma need a good sound card (I only have a laptop) so I can play without latency.

If any of you at all can give me advice on an affordable, good quality external sound card then I'll be very grateful.


Cheers,

 

[evergreenthompson]

Bueller?... Bueller?... Anyone?... Anyone?...

I'm also curious to see what people recommend.

 

[maffro]

Not as curious as me =7D

 

[kanthos]

I personally have the Edirol UA-25. I found it to be great for all I use it for (I've used it to record instruments through a mic, as a MIDI interface, and for playing live with a laptop). I haven't really tried any other soundcards though, so I can't compare it with anything else.

 

[maffro]

*Looks up Edirol UA-25*

Yeah, that looks pretty sound (geddit? I'm sorry anyway)

Fine for Mics, got some pre-amps, I can MIDI imput. Looks like the kinda thing I'll need.
And can that just go straight through my USB port into a software mixer, or is there anything else I'd need?

 

[evergreenthompson]

maffro, did you end up buying a Edirol UA-25? Something else? If so, how did it work out for you?

 

[kanthos]

Also missed your previous post, sorry. Yes, it can go into a software mixer.

 

[maffro]

Well, the Edirol looks good. I'm currently trying to choose between that and the M-Box 2

http://www.guitarampkeyboard.com/options.php?id=68430&gclid=CI2vhtT71JcCFQFvGgod6hQbDg

Tada.

They both seem like solid interfaces. The M-box comes in at about £100 more, but comes packaged with ProTools LE7. However I'd have to pay MORE money to make it Vista compatible by upgrading to LE7.4. Why does all music equipment seem to hate Vista?

The M-Box was on reccomendation of my Piano teacher who does a lot of work on Reason and ProTools, but I'm finding it really hard to make my mind up between the two. Because as I've already made clear, I know nothing about anything.

But I have to decide reeeal soon. Grr. The edirol seems like a safe bet, if it'll run as well as the M-Box.

 

[kanthos]

Do you already have a DAW on your computer? Do you already have some decent plugins? If so, get the UA-25; if not, get the M-Box 2. Both are functionally the same; the M-Box 2 seems to be more expensive simply because of the bundled software.

One thing worth knowing: Pro Tools, at least the LE version which is bundled with the M-Box 2, is only compatible with some types of plugins and not with others. It mainly supports RTAS plugins; VSTs (the most popular plugin format) can only be used in Pro Tools with software that acts as a mediator between the VST format and the RTAS format (in other words, you load this other software as an RTAS plugin; the other software loads your VST plugins and translates between Pro Tools and the VST plugin). There's some overhead involved in doing that, and the software may or may not be free.

That's not to say that Pro Tools is bad; if you don't already have a DAW and plugins and you don't have money to buy that on top of an audio interface, this is a good deal; if you already have a lot of plugins that don't come in RTAS format (many come in both) or you're already used to using a different DAW and don't want to switch, Pro Tools won't do much for you.

 

[evergreenthompson]

They both seem like solid interfaces. The M-box comes in at about £100 more, but comes packaged with ProTools LE7. However I'd have to pay MORE money to make it Vista compatible by upgrading to LE7.4. Why does all music equipment seem to hate Vista?

You should be able to get a free upgrade to Pro-Tools LE8. At least that's what GC's web site says.

Update: Here's the official word from Digidesign's web site.

IDK that all music equipment hates Vista. Could be Vista hates music equipment! It does seem to be getting better though. I'm also starting to see more and more support for 64-bit WinXP and Vista, which is good, because one of the laptops I was considering to replace my aging 1.7Gz P4 machine comes with 64-bit Vista. (Truth be told, I'm quite happy with WinXP right now, but I take Vista if I have to.)

 

[evergreenthompson]

Not to hijack the thread, but this is somewhat related... What are the system requirements for Pro-Tools (8)? Definite system specs appear to be rather hard to dig up. If your (maffro) machine is too old to run the software, MBox won't be a good choice.

Update: BTW, it looks like the UA-25/UA-25EX comes with an assortment of Cakewalk products. System specs for those can be found on the appropriate product pages on Cakewalk's site.

 

[maffro]

Well my laptop is quite new. I bought it about 3 months ago. It's a decent bit of kit.

Currently, I have no DAW on this computer. Only Reason, which only does MIDI to my knowledge.

And you're right, maybe Vista does hate recording music. Curse it. I would have been happy with WinXP, but the only computer I possess with XP is..... well. It can't run word and IE at the same time. It definately wouldn't handle music recording.

I might go for the ProTools bundle, solely for the purpose of getting a full setup straight away. It'll probably be easier for me that way. The upgrade to 8 looks fine, it's just the paying to get 7.4 I don't approve of.

But I'll cope. Thanks for all the help, guys!