[RWP] Looking for external sound card

[Chris Belle]

Ken,
I know easier said than done, but you need to save your nickels and quit 
trying to pull a tractor trailer with a go cart.

I've been through this with a student or two who actually had money but 
insisted she knew better, and it ended up costing her a lot to trouble 
shoot, because she just knew that you could make a netbook out of a daw.

I don't mean to seem like a smart ass, but you've kind of made your own 
case.

Even if you got a decent asio card,
your d p c latency on that netbook will probably be pretty high.

These things were not designed for high performance audio these are
low cost, low power machines designed for a bit of web surfing, writing 
letters to grandma, and maybe term papers for college students and on a 
good day,
writing a vlickery web video.

Reap[er is kind on system resources,
and even a low power netbook has enough juice to record raw audio, the 
demands for recording a couple tracks of audio isn't so high, but the 
minute you start asking it to do real time plug-ins,
soft-synths and such, you will screw the pooch.

YOu might be able to tweak this and stroke that, and make it half way 
work a little bit, but is it worth it?

I mean if your broke brok,e nad don't have anything else, ok you can't 
do any better, but if you can,
for goodness sake, use that netbook to take reaper notes, and get a 
better machine for doing audio.

It's not just about the ram, all the sub systems in those things are 
just not wonderful,
we have one o f the more powerful netbooks with 4 gigs in it, and it's a 
great little machine, but it just craps out when trying to use sonar.

Well even reaper has some of the same requirements as sonar does,
a daw is a daw,
asio itself requires a computer that can keep up with it,
and if your d p c latency is down in the thousands, you are just out of 
luck.

YOu are probably geting by with things now while you're learning,
but when you start trying to do some real work,
you are going to need some adequate tools.

that's my humble oppinion.

Netbooks can be deceiving, even though they say the processor is 1.8 
gigs, and 4 gigs of ram,
by the time you factor in all the other stuff you are running something 
like a 700 mhz
pentium 3, someone a lot smarter than me gave us that comparison a while 
back.

My experience tells me that's true.

YOu may not be able to afford a purpose built daw right now, but if you 
can even a refurb from dell or something tweaked out a bit from tiger 
direct budget bin will do better than a netbook.

Warmest.


On 11/30/2014 6:34 PM, Ken Downey wrote:
> I have seen the general dislike of Soundblaster cards on this list, 
> and I'm wondering what you all recommend. I'm running Windows XP on an 
> old netbook computer, and latency is certainly the biggest problem, 
> which is why I figure whatever sound card I get must have its own Asio 
> system built-in.
> My keyboard outputs to a quarter-inch jack, but I've got it converted 
> to 8th-inch and run it into my current card's line-in. The keyboard 
> has a line-in jack of its own into which I plug my Olympus dm901 
> recorder, using it as a stereo microphone. I used to have a headphone 
> splitter that was good for letting in signals from the iPhone and 
> recorder simultaneously, but those seem hard to find, so obviously the 
> more inputs on the card the better, but i could certainly make due 
> with the standard one mic and one line-in. Buffering is the main 
> point, and it's physically impossible to get more than two gigs of ram 
> on this computer, which is why I need the card to be as capable of as 
> much of that kind of thing as possible. What are your thoughts?
>
>
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