Any suggestion for a new sound card?

2014-08-07 11:53 pm

Hello!

My old PC has left me alone, and I'm going to build a new one from scratch this month. I'll be running Win7, I doubt I'll be going for Win8.

As for the sound card, I'd need some advice on what to buy: I have always had SoundBlaster cards and have loved them all, so I think I'll go for a new SoundBlaster (not even taking into account the built-in sound card on the motherboard...), but I can't decide which one would be best for NWC use. I mostly use NWC for recording study bases for my choir to rehearse and for composing orchestral music: I usually need complex files with many voices and instruments to perform well.

My old sound card was an Audigy with (just?) 48 MIDI channels, I'd like to have some recent card with good Win7 drivers, but still with many MIDI channels and soundfont support.

The one thing I'm sure I won't be changing at this moment is my 5.1 analogic speaker system, so I need a card with 5.1/7.1 analogic connectors.

Any advice (or wise info on what not to buy) will be much appreciated, thank you all!!!

[Just to know: are there any good 1150 socket motherboards with good soundcards which support soundfonts, MIDI files, NWC and the like?]

Re: Any suggestion for a new sound card?

Reply #1 – 2014-08-08 08:52 am

Hello Aure.
I have the same problem some time ago, when I updated my computer.

The first problem I found was that most of the soundcards I checked (even the SoundBlaster ones) were not as good as my old SoundBlaster Live!, and won't be better as your old Audigy... With my old soundcard I was able to change the size of the RAM dedicated to load SoundFonts, but the new cards didn't do this, at least the economic ones that I saw... The problem is that the SoundFont technology is a little bit obsolette but I know that most of NWC users are still using it (me too!! ^_^).
There's a software solution to this problem: "SyFonOne". You can redirect the NWC MIDI output to this software (through MIDI-Yoke or some other virtual MIDI ports) and you can load any soundfont to play. It will work with almost any soundcard, even the motherboard built-in ones, and it works fine. Just remember to install the "ASIO4ALL" drivers, if not it will have lots of latency. Of course there's bad points too... only 16 MIDI channels. My old soundcard had 2 slots (Port A & Port B) with 16 channels each one. There's a software called "SynthFont" with 2 MIDI slots up to 32 MIDI channels: same developers of "SyFonOne" and the same options, or even more, but it only works with MIDI files out of NWC. (Just create a MIDI file and load it into the SynthFont).

My first choice: If you can, save your old SoundCard with your new computer. The drivers for it with Win7 or Win8 must be a problem, but maybe you won't find a better soundcard for using with NWC. Try to find a solution to make this soundcard compatible with your new system.

My second choice: Try the software that I told before. It can be used with the motherboard built-in soundcard and it's for free, so testing it won't be bad

My third choice: If you will get a new computer, go into new technologies... Try new MIDI sequencers as CUBASE or ProTOOLS and go into the world of Virtual Instruments (VSTi, RTAS, etc...). It will require a "real" recording soundcard, like those M-Audio, Focusrite or some others and, of course, they are much more expensive and with no MIDI engine (only the interface), but the sound that will make is much much much better than soundfonts... also much much much hard to configure, but well... everything has it's own bad points

Of course, all those VST won't be freeware... (~~maybe you could find them on pirate webs~~, but this is not a legal option so... you know ¬¬)

Anyway, I hope all those words help you a little... If you have some more questions feel free to ask ^_^
Good luck.

PD: some useful links to this software (Excuse me if I'm doing somethig wrong...)

-> SynthFont 1.712 & SyFonOne: http://www.synthfont.com/Downloads.html
-> MIDI Yoke: http://midiox.com/index.htm
-> ASIO4ALL: http://www.asio4all.com/

Re: Any suggestion for a new sound card?

Reply #2 – 2014-08-08 03:55 pm

I also use SyFonOne. However, on my machine (Dell laptop running Win7) ASIO4all causes more problems than it cures. I just feed the built-in sound card. The threatened latency problem doesn't occur.

There is another solution, and it doesn't require installing a thing, although it won't play directly from NWC. Export your NWC file as a MIDI file and upload it to http://solmire.com/. The site will convert it to an MP3 using the sound font of your choice (there are 12 or 14 to choose from), which you can then download back to your machine. The service is free.

All of this is made necessary by the fact that SoundBlaster, which I believe was the originator of the sound font concept, no longer supports them (grrr) AND no longer supports their own old sound cards that use sound fonts - you can't get Win7 or Win8 drivers for them (double grrrr).

HTH -

Bill

Re: Any suggestion for a new sound card?

Reply #3 – 2014-08-08 04:59 pm

My two pence: http://www.kode54.net/bassmididrv/

Re: Any suggestion for a new sound card?

Reply #4 – 2014-08-10 02:48 pm

You can still get (via Amazon) a Creative X-Fi which has 7.1 sound output, 2 x 16 MIDI channel engines, sound font capability and Windows 7 drivers. My model is SB0882 and works fine.