Snd Card Vs. Interface? Options

[meadows.83]

I have 3 questions.

What would be the major drawback of choosing a quality sound card
over an interface?

Do you think a powermac g4 w/ an m-audio sound card and pro tools free would be a decent
budget setup?

This one's kind of off topic, but, I tried using pro tools free on a slower pc, and recording was
choppy, and i couldn't hear what i was playing until a second later. Is this what is referred to
as latency, and do you think this would happen with the g4/m-audio/pt free setup?

Thanx for your help.

[xingu]

What would be the major drawback of choosing a quality sound card
over an interface?

Maybe it's just me, but it all comes down to semantics. When I hear 'soundcard', I think Soundblaster and cards for gaming or movie purposes, as opposed to a dedicated audio interface that is designed specifically for computer audio recording. If recording is what you want to do, buy the tools that were designed to do it for the best results.

Do you think a powermac g4 w/ an m-audio sound card and pro tools free would be a decent budget setup?

Sure. What m-audio product(s) are you speaking of? I generally think of their stuff as audio interfaces (as opposed to soundcards). You might also want to look at Edirol and Tascam, which both offer reasonably priced audio interfaces. A key deciding factor is the number of inputs you need and how well the drivers work. Read through the forums here and you'll find much discussion on these and other products. And anything with Pro Tools free is a decent budget setup! If the particular Mac you're looking at has an audio input, you could really budget by using the internal Sound Manager and forget about the audio interface.

Is this what is referred to as latency, and do you think this would happen with the g4/m-audio/pt free setup?

Yep, that's good old latency, which is bascially unavoidable in computer recording (although under OSX it has been greatly reduced with Core Audio). Many audio interfaces feature what's known as direct input monitoring, which eliminates this problem by bypassing the signal that is processed by the computer and outputting the sound at the source.

Keep in mind that Pro Tools Free only runs in OS9, so if you don't have the computer yet and are buying a new OSX-only boot Mac, you'll be SOL (or, rather, you'll have to actually purchase some kind of DAW software).