I&#39;ve been lurking on LAU for a few months now and I&#39;ve finally managed to come up with something worth asking:<br>I&#39;m looking for an affordable external sound card for music production. What are your recommendations?
<br>Being a novice, I&#39;m having trouble finding what I &quot;need&quot; (and I&#39;m growing wary of google&#39;s pagerank system...) so I thought I&#39;d query the real experts. ;-)<br><br>I try to keep my options open, but there are some things I prefer:
<br>-It should be a hell of a lot better than the crapy onboard AC&#39;97 sound I use right now (SNAP-CRACKLE-POP)<br>-It should be external: USB or Firewire or otherwise are all OK (I&#39;ll be using it with my desktop now, but I plan on setting up a laptop for music some time)
<br>-It should be affordable: I can always make exceptions here (especially since I&#39;m not very familiar with this type of hardware), but I&#39;d prefer if it were around $200 USD or less.<br>-It should be *exceptionally* functional with Linux and JACK. (Naturally, this is best proven through experience)
<br>-Although the above should cover this, it ought to work with my Novation X-Station synthesizer (which already works great through USB with JACK)<br><br>I&#39;d really appreciate any recommendations -- or blacklists (although ALSA&#39;s soundcard matrix usually faithful enough) -- of hardware to be used by a novice electronic musician.
<br><br>I try to be brief, so if I&#39;m being too ambiguous just ask me for details!<br><br>Thanks,<br>&nbsp; -Lou<br>