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Looper's Delight
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a very quick disclaimer: I'm a relative newbie to computer music composition, having been involved with the World Beat movement for 22 years as an artist and producer so take everything I say here with a grain of salt. I've tried my best to research this particular area but there is much that I am ignorant of. If I've got anything wrong, please help educate me and don't waste time flaming me. Thanks. I've found that the Soundblaster live card (which I used for my entire first CD of abstract electronica) had tremendous problems with my VIA motherboard and was advised by one of my computer gurus (Si Moorehead, one of the geniuses at EMU/Creative) teh the VIA motherboards are notorious for conflicts. I finally gave up and bought a brand new Intel motherboard and, presto, everything is working hunky dory. Be advised: I have heard that the A/D/A converters are not very good (below pro specs, certainly) and that because they use a 48k sampling rate that every time you do anything in the 44k sampling range (like EVERYTHING having to do with CD manufacturing) that it forces the sounds to go through this crummy conversion on the way in and on the way out. How I circumvented this problem (and avoided buying an expensive DAT machine in the process) was to buy a MidiMan FLYING COW A/D/A converter that supports 24/96 recording, SPDIF and has balanced stereo ins and outs. It set me back about $350 as I remember and allows me to SPDIF everything in and out of the SoundBlaster live card thus (I hope I've figure out correctly) circumventing the SoundBlasters A/D/A converters all together. I also just read that ART has a new stereo A/D/A converter (I think called the DI/O) which the catalogues are selling for only $250. As long as you buy a Sound Blaster Live card that has SPDIF in and out (a waste of time if it doesn't) you do NOT have to spring for their most expensive card. If it has SPDIF it is as good a card as they make. You just pay for the breakout box and all of their software (much of which is pretty superfluous if you are doing serious recording/composing) by purchasing the expensive card. Total outlay for a pretty cool and quite setup: $350!!!! Not bad. I believe it is the cheapest way I know of achieving 'champagne' high quality results on a 'beer' budget. One last thing: Windows '98 has a new version out which has really resolved a lot of the conflicts with a lot of drivers. Download the upgrade and install it. It has made a huge impact on the stability of my system (which got pretty damn wobbly last year). I must confess that for music applications I still don't trust Windows ME yet. Anybody have any good luck stories with it, yet? It always seems the best bet to wait two years for any Windows operating system before they work out the kinks. yours, Rick Walker (loop.pool)