14 Oct
2004
14 Oct
'04
11:40 a.m.
giovedì, 14 ottobre 2004 alle 12:47:25, Alejandro Lopez ha scritto:
The only other thing is I may need to buy a decent
soundcard for this
PC. It should have a GM synth (nothing special since I guess I'll be
using soft synths anyway but I don't want to run a synth just to write
a couple of arrangements), one stereo output and one stereo input both
with good overall audio quality. Seemingly, the current trend is
towards either USB 2.0, firewire or PCI. A colleague has just told me
that USB 2.0 is supported by the Linux kernel starting from the latest
version (2.6 I think?) only. Since music distributions are based on
other distributions, chances are that they now run the 2.4 kernel or
maybe older. Does that make sense or am I talking complete b*ll*cks?
Also, this friend has heard about drops happening with audio over USB,
but apparently this was on a Mac and the USB device was a hard disk
rather than a soundcard. Still, he seems to think that USB 2.0 is not
as good option as firewire for audio. (Which reminds me of SCSI vs IDE
drives for audio a few years back, yes SCSI was the serious option for
a couple of years but it was an 80% more expensive as well, and shortly
afterwards IDE started to go "fast enough" and cheaper.) Is firewire
better? Is it more expensive? Also, how does it compare to PCI? Lastly,
if any of you has bought a soundcard (recently so the card is still in
production) which is reasonably similar to what I need (wouldn't mind
if it's slightly better, say 4 mono inputs and 4 mono outputs or
something) and has succeed with having it running under a Linux based
music studio, I'd be grateful if you drop a line.
As far as I know firewire based audio cards still aren't supported by ALSA,
and USB devices aren't that good, especially with jack (a sound server
which you probably *want* to run ;)
Also onboard synths are difficult to find nowadays on pro or semi-pro
hardware, for this is better to stick to an hw external expander or a
soft-synth like qsynth or timidity.
Among PCI cards, one of the best value for price is IMHO the m-audio
audiophile 24/96, which in europe you can find at around 100 eur. It is a
pure stereo card based on the well supported envy24 chip, it has s/pdif
I/O, analog I/O and MIDI I/O :
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Audiophile2496-main.html
I don't owe one, but I have recommended it to a pair of friends and they
seem to have liked it :)
As for 4 I/O, the only one I know is the m-audio delta 44 (around 155 euro
in europe, but *without* s/pdif and MIDI):
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta44-main.html
the delta 66 is the same as the 44 but with s/pdif (~ 190 euro).
Then, the cheapest (of which I'm aware of) 8 I/O interface is the staudio
dsp2000 c-port (around 400 euro in EU):
http://www.staudio.com/products/dsp2000.html
Many thanks!!
HTH ciao
PS: I've taken current prices from http://www.thomann.de , with italian tax
rates applied.
--
Emiliano Grilli
Linux user #209089
http://www.emillo.net