On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 05:57:59PM -0500, Chris wrote: Depends on how anal you want to get about your sound quality. For an average home recordist like me, the converters built in to the M-audio Delta series is more than adequate. RME has some comparable options. Converters, and number of simultaneous ins / outs. LOTS of simultaneous ins / outs with low latency. IMO there is little or no fluff on the RME and M-audio soundcards. The question is, what's a typical session for you? Think about how many signals you need to get into and out of the computer at once. If you never do more than e.g. two mics on a guitar, you could get by with a card with stereo I/O. OTOH, if you wanted to track a big live band with 8 drum mics (kick, snare, 3 toms, hi-hat, 2 overheads), 2 mics on 2 guitar amps, a bassist, 3 mics on a horn section, 2-4 channels of keyboards, at least 1 vocal channel for scratch vocals... and a mic or two out in the room to pick up general ambience... and IF you need to put each of those signals on its own track for later editing / tweaking / mixing... you're up to 21 channels already. The hammerfall is really your only choice for Linux at that point (unless you can work out how to sync three M-audio Delta 1010's and use them as one virtual "card"... should be possible but I don't know of anyone who's done it under linux). For what? I don't know what you mean. Yes. No, unless you're talking about something like ADAT lightpipe which is 8 channels I/O per lightpipe jack. But nobody will market a card as having "1 lightpipe I/O" when they could market it as having "8 digital inputs, 8 digital outputs". Don't know what you saw. Ardour *does* support plugins. The only "standard" on linux at the moment is LADSPA. There are a number of nice Ladspa plugins, and there are more and better ones added all the time. We have some quite good reverbs, delays, and EQs. THere are compressors, too; I haven't tried them lately. Lots of stuff. Distortion... etc. etc... start at www.ladspa.org. Also, both Ardour and Ecasound use JACK for I/O. This means you can patch signals from your recorder / mixer app into and out of other JACK-aware apps, such as Freqtweak, which is a very interesting and bizarre radical EQ device. In fact, you can run ardour as a recorder and use Ecamegapedal (based on ecasound) as an effects device for ardour! Some people use "trackers". There are also full-featured MIDI sequencers, e.g. Rosegarden and MuSE. I'm currently looking around for a drum-machine-like app that feels right to me. seq24 looks promising, but I only just installed it and haven't managed to get it to talk to a softsynth or sampler yet. Direct guitar is tough... Currently I mic my amp. Your other alternatives are 1) a device built for this purpose, e.g. the Pod Pro; or 2) a simple direct box into a mic input on your mixer, feeding your soundcard, feeding some amp emulation software. There are a couple LADSPA plugins that were much discussed recently on linux-audio-dev for this purpose. http://quitte.de/dsp/preamp.html I've been meaning to try those... I got stuff from quietpc and it was a definite improvement. But really it's a hard problem. Remember how studios have tape closets? well, now a lot of them have computer closets. :-( Be sure you realize that Ardour is still pre-beta and it can be quite an adventure. E.g. sometimes the session file format changes and you have to jump through hoops to get your old sessions to load. And it's still pretty easy to crash it. But it improves weekly, sometimes daily. I don't think you'll find ardour or ecasound as straightforward as a familiar cassette 4-track. Just like Photoshop is not as straightforward as a pencil. :) It's realistic. You don't say whether you have mixer, mics, and mic stands. I have similar needs and I ended up with a Mackie 1202 VLZ-Pro and an M-audio Delta 66, both "like new" from Ebay, and I paid around $500 total. (I forget the exact amount.) You could cut the total cost by getting one of the older versions of the 1202 (the VLZ or the original 1202) and by getting a Delta 44, which is the same except without S/PDIF I/O. Anyway, assuming the card and mixer run you $500, you've now budgeted $500 for a decent mic, a mic stand, and some cables. :) You could also skip the mixer and get M-audio's Omni I/O gadget, but personally I'd rather have the mixer - they're just so damn handy. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com "Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"

Chris, Welcome. I'll throw some comments in below. I see you've gotten some good ones already from good people. I suspect you'll get some more over the next day or two. I am a home enthusiast. I have worked and recorded at different times in my career, which is not in music. Take my comments with a grain of salt. Mark On Fri, 2002-12-13 at 14:57, Chris wrote: [MWK] Very, but not so critical that you need to spend a lot of money starting out. A sound card based set is fine for a start. Build up your studio over time. Probably every bit as important is the clocking for the A/D & D/A as the actual converters themselves. But don't worry about any of this right now. Get started. Make music. Make recordings and learn. The RME products are really nice. I own two. They give you a lot of I/O in a small space. They are relatively expensive by PC sound card standards, but not that expensive by studio standards.One thing they support is an external Word Clock which I think is very important, but even I don't use quite yet. (I've been at this a few years and am still improving my system too!) ABSOLUTELY!! That way I don't need A/D's and D/A's, except that the output of my signal chain. And I get a lot of signals across a little piece of glass. Generally it's one for one up to 48KHz. After 48 KHz ADAT lines take two channels to support 1 input. It's good, but it's probably safe to say that it varies a lot also. However, even if you take some of the best commercial effects stuff from Waves for the PC or Mac, even those don't necessarily compare to hardware effects processors. It's all relative, and it all costs money. Well, except for the open source stuff. That costs time. ;-) I use both. I like hardware drum machines when I'm recording. I also use my hardware drum machine to interface to some drum pads in case I want to play a drum part myself. (Alesis DM-5 - Ebay - $220 I think) I use a Pod Pro. I like it. I haven't played loud through and amp in years. I think amps are better, but David Gilmour said 'Big amps sound good in big rooms, and small amps sound good in small rooms, and you need to change the mics a lot'. It all costs money and takes up space. For me, Pod Pro is a good compromise. Water cooled if you're prepared technically, or go with the things others have told you about.