Well all this time I've had a SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit External USB device but I had erroneously dismissed it as having no MIDI capability. When I would plug it into my laptop, the plug & play Windows driver recognizes the device & allows the playback of wav/mp3 so, it was "working" and I never bothered to install Creatives driver for it. It didn't show up as a MIDI playback device in Windows / NWC, so I assumed it just couldn't do it.
2 days later out of pure boredom/desperation I installed Creatives driver and now it shows up as a MIDI playback device. Install the driver - what a concept.
So using the USB SoundBlaster did the trick, my timing issues are gone & I can use soundfonts etc.
I used NWC years ago on a PC that had some variety of old PCI Live or Value SoundBlaster card. Worked great. Haven't used NWC for years until recently, now on a laptop.
Playing back a composition in NWC, I'm noticing the timing occasionally falters. I'll just populate a staff with 1/8th notes, set a 95 tempo and play it, it's spot on tempo for 90% of the piece but once in a while it falters, sounds herky-jerky in random parts of the playback every time you play it. I assume this is the playback hardware's fault.
Despite the fact this laptop is orders of magnitude "faster" than the PC I used to use, (a 2.0ghz core duo vs. a old 450mhz celeron) I'm assuming it's integrated sound is utter crap. So much so that even an old PCI SB Value, which is crap, was actually better than what I've got in my laptop now.
Now I'm not too hardcore about this stuff, I know a musician with a full blown DAW studio/setup, he uses Sonar and he's got all kinds of crazy MIDI gear. I'm not really a keyboard player so I just need something simple, relatively inexpensive that works with my laptop (and that will let me mess with SoundFonts) that I can compose musical scores with by hand in NWC, so what's important to me is playback accuracy rather than input latency and all that stuff.
So I was checking out the PCMCIA card line from SoundBlaster (e.g. X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook and the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook) but the website is rather cryptic when it comes to MIDI. Any suggestions? Is there a defacto external sound device at or below 100 bucks that most people use that I should just go out and get?
