Audio Cards, Which one is for me? Options

[gleit]

I'm about to dive into computer music, and am wondering which audio card I'll need (and why). My controller will have USB out (it'll be a GI-20 pitch/midi converter triggered by a piccolo bass for low latency), and I plan on running that into a G4 powerbook (12 inch, spr drive with 60 gb hard drive and 640MB memory). There I plan on using MAX/MSP for building synth sounds to trigger and cubase or reason for sequencing. I want to do all this for a live perfomance setting, so I need things to be fast.

I know nothing about computer music, so I'm lost as far as which soundcard I need (and why).

Please help,
Jason Lange

[boze]

hi gleit-
i have yet to buy a soundcard for my laptop, so i'm not the perfect person to be giving you advice. am i right in understanding that you are using a bass for midi input? anyway, the thing that will help determine which sound cards are most appropriate is your need for i/o. so far it sounds like all you need is a midi interface. i've done a half dozen live laptop shows so far and while i'm itching to get some sort of fw soundcard, there's a lot you can do without one. my gigs involved me writing creating beats in reason and then doing an addative/tweaking performance in Ableton Live while playing my jazz guitar along over the top. sampling the guitar or other live input would have been a special treat, but my point is that you need to talk a little bit about what you want to be able to do before folks can know whether you need something like this:

http://www.tascam.com/products/computer_re...us122/index.php

or something like this:

http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM01/Co...OTU/PR/828.html

or something in between.

firewire soundcards will give you more tracks at higher bitrates, but there are fewer of them out and they're all more expensive than usb soundcards.

one i had my eye on was the m-audio firewire410, but some people don't like m-audio products in general and this card (while a good size and price) only has two inputs i think and not four. here's a link: http://m-audio.com/products/m-audio/fw410.php

these cards are examples of the types of cards you'll find: simple or fancy usb, simple or fancy fw. unfortunately, there are hardly any options in the 'simple fw' catagory.

[boze]

i should add that i really think usb1 was never intended to be using for audio i/o, and i that as a pbook owner a fw interface would be a real treat if there was one that met your needs and had good osx drivers and wasn't too expensive for what it offered.

i'm curious to see how the advent of usb2 affects the laptop soundcard market because vastly superior bandwidth of fw over usb is going to be completely negated once usb busses on laptops are all usb2.

anyway, good luck and post again with what you're hoping to do as far as recording and playback options. and have fun with max/msp!