[LAD] What sound cards are recommender by developers? I'll order next week!!!

[Johannes Kroll]

On Sat, 21 May 2011 16:56:04 +0200
Ralf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 2011-05-21 at 22:10 +0800, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> > If you cannot keep your Envy24 card for MIDI I/O, you might want to check out
> > the ESI MIDIMATE II. It's a minimal USB MIDI interface (it's really
> > just a cable,
> > no box) which works very well in my setup. This could open up a few more
> > alternatives for you, in case you decide on a device that would
> > require you to remove
> > the Envy24 card.
> 
> I've got 2 PCI slots and two Envy24 PCI cards. I guess that most other
> PCI audio cards ship with a MIDI interface too, but I'm not sure if the
> MIDI jitter will fit to my needs. Fortunately Jack2 from svn (jackd
> --sync -Xalsarawmidi -dalsa ...) + my Envy24 cards do fit to my needs
> regarding to MIDI jitter, but audio doesn't ;). I do have a Swissonic
> USB device, but I avoid to use any USB device when making music, perhaps
> I'm wooed by fad ;), I even disable USB card reader by my
> session-handling-scripts (sudo killall -9 -w pcscd ;). No USB mouse,
> keyboard or printer etc. here. To be honset, I didn't tested zthe USB
> MIDI with current Jack2.

I can see how the packet-based nature of USB could create jitter when
using a USB<->MIDI device. But how could some unrelated device like a
card reader create MIDI jitter?

On the topic of sound cards: can anyone recommend a cheap external USB
sound card with many separate outputs (8 would be nice) and good Linux
driver support? Professional-level sound quality isn't paramount, just
lots of outputs. :)