I've been looking to replace my sound card and it's very difficult to
find a good all-purpose sound card these days.

About four years ago I purchased a Creative Sound Blaster PCI512, for
years this served me as a good all-purpose sound card. I use a single
desktop to play games, surf the web, do work and as a hobby do MIDI
sequencing. I found the PCI512 to be a good all around card that didn't
cost too much (around $99 MSRP). One of my favorite features of this
card was it's ability to support SoundFonts and I use SoundFonts will
Cakewalk (and more recently Sonar) to do synth and sequencing.

Then Windows XP Service Pack 2 came and this the PCI512 does not get
along well the SP2. I contacted Creative support and they basicly told
me I'm out of luck as no other drivers are planed for this "legacy"
card. I refuse to remove SP2 and would rather go ahead and update my
hardware. So I went shoping and...

I found few sound cards that even have MIDI port on board. Creative has
a stripped the game/MIDI adapter port off all their consumer and
"prosumer" SB line. What's more, the SoundFont compatibility seems to
be non-existant on the new cards.

So I ended up paying $150 and buying the E-MU ProteuxX package (E-MU
404 card with EmulatorX (soft synth) lite edition). It's been a very
painful three days trying to go through all the documentation and
configure this card properly, what's more for a "entry level" proaudio
card it's very unuser friendly. I have dozens of parameters I can tweak
on each virtual instrument and I have a really solid GM set (and about
a gig or so more virtual instruments) that sound great, but I'm not
overall happy with the 404 soundcard. It's not idea for an all-purpose
sound card, it has no synth capabilities at all, it has more ports than
I'll ever need. ProtuesX (the name they've given to EmulatorX lite) is
more than I will ever need. I do like the hardware effects processor on
the 404, but overall I want something much simpler that just sound
good. I'd like a solid GM bank, I'd like Yamaha XG support, I'd like a
high level of compatibility the Cakewalks Sonar (I'm running version 2)
and I really want the ability to extend the synth capabilities through
SoundFonts or some similar technology (the E-MU card uses VSTs, which
is fine although they aren't natively supported in Sonar 2)
All ideas welcome!

-Jeremy