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Where have all the entry level synth cards gone?
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 |
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