I am a newbie with Audio and I need to know if I need an Audio Card and if so, what kind does anyone recommend? I recently purchased the Studio Case (Cubase SE) and I am a little more familiar with the MIDI portion of it. Now I'd like to explore the Audio side. I have a 1GHz PowerPC G4 that only boots in OSX. It is a single processor. Is the Audio Card for better MIDI also?

I am pretty new to this but I can tell you what I use. My sound card is an Audiophile USB by M-Audio. It has audio and midi in/out, 24 bit, and 96kHz sampling rate, with drivers for OSX. It's pretty good bang for your buck at ~$200 at online music stores.

Do you have to have it? What does it do for you?

one thing about the Audiophile - check with M-Audio if this will indeed work with a G5, there's been some incompatabilities with older PCI cards and the G5's new PCI-X slots.

he could also look into a USB-2 or even better Firewire solution to audio in/out with Cubase.

If you are not doing audio in/out and you already have midi in/out you don't need it. However, I use it for recording guitar and vocal lines as well as midi. Without a sound card or break out box with the appropriate inputs you can't record audio directly into your computer.

Thanks for replying. I'd like to do vocals eventually , but I'm not in a rush. What card would you recommend?

I can only speak of the sound card I have, the Audiophile-USB. It works fine for me and the specs are good. I also don't know if there is a cheaper sound card with comparable specs. Good luck!

you only need audio card if you plan on bringing external sound into Cubase or you want to send "quality" sound out of the computer through nice monitors or to an amp or another recording medium... if you just plan to use midi or audio samples to compose and don't have external synths or other sound devices to record then you really don't need the audio card... this is just to send audio into computer and out. You can use headphone jack for monitoring or built-in speakers (which aren't the best for critical listening). It just depends on what exactly your musical goals are really

Thanks for your input and help, guys. A light bulb is coming on about audio cards. I was in the complete darkness.