Doc wrote:

Not to knock the Roland in any way, I'm sure it's a fine piece of gear,
but I wonder if you've ever heard *good* Soundfonts. Are you basing this
strictly on the cheesy 2, 4 & 8 meg Soundfont banks that came with the
card?

Not entirely, no. I built up a substantial collection of
special-purpose soundfonts, and I haven't used those since, either.

Have you ever heard Soundfonts built from a high quality sample
library or good homemade samples? The Audigy would obviously provide a
better showcase for them since the Live is limited to 32 megs. With the
Audigy, if you've got a couple of gigs of RAM you could for example build
a nice stereo grand piano with natural decay instead of looping, sampled
on every half-step with multiple velocity layers.

Looking at it now, what really made a difference is Roland's onboard
effects engines. The reverb knocked spots off the Live's reverberation
engine. Also, going to an outboard solution gives you the ability to
do an auxilliary send-receive, which wasn't possible before.

What was most important (to me.. your opinions and requirements may vary)
was that doing everything through outboard hardware also insulates you
from the OS. With soundfonts I was pretty much stuck with SB Live on
Windows, since at the time, Linux didn't have good enough soundfont
support to do anything at all.

Anyway, this is what _I_ did, and why.. not a forcible recommendation

--
JP Morris - aka DOUG the Eagle (Dragon) -=UDIC=-
Fun things to do with the Ultima games http://www.it-he.org
Reign of the Just - An Ultima clone http://rotj.it-he.org
d+++ e+ N+ T++ Om U1234!56!7'!S'!8!9!KAW u++ uC+++ uF+++ uG---- uLB----
uA--- nC+ nR---- nH+++ nP++ nI nPT nS nT wM- wC- y a(YEAR - 1976)