[RWP] Looking for external sound card

[Patrick Perdue]

Want a laugh?

I have a Windows 8.1 tablet, using an Atom processor. Just for fun, I 
ran the DPC latency checker on it, and couldn't get anything less than 
about 1000 MicroS. Yep, I'll be running Sonar on that.

I have actually done some *extremely* limited stuff with Reaper on that 
machine, basically processing a live input with a couple of compressors, 
and that worked. Any more than that, and it cried pretty hard. Yeah, 
what Chris said. Ditch the netbook.

On 12/1/2014 3:00 AM, Chris Belle wrote:
> 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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>
>
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