[Fedora-music-list] Need soundcard advice

Brian Monroe briancmonroe at gmail.com
Tue Dec 30 09:10:49 UTC 2014


Personally I would go with an external USB card. Pretty common with most
modern home studio setups.

Most of them will work, you'll just want something that has midi out.

I'm pretty sure the sound card doesn't have separate memory for sound
fonts. I think that's all loaded in the system memory.



Any of the cards listed here:
http://www.sweetwater.com/c695--USB_Audio_Interfaces/params=eyJmYWNldCI6eyJNSURJIElcL08iOlsiSW4iXX19
will probably work.

The key words you can look for are "class compliant" to ensure that you
won't have any issues with drivers. That being said: Behringer will
probably give you the most bang for the buck,  Lexicon I know for sure
works and is one of the cheapest. Prosonus, Avid, Focusrite are all pretty
well known standards. I'm 90% sure it's going to work on 99% of all of
those brands devices.

Be careful with M-Audio. Some of their firmware in the past has been
proprietary and has a few more steps to setup. (though I think there were
drivers or patches available last time I checked for most stuff, just not
as easy as everything else. Safe to think of them as the broadcom and
nvidia of audio cards)

Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU), Akai, and Roland are probably overkill for the
project.


These are all USB suggestions. There are firewire cards out there that
offer super low latency, but from what I'm hearing that's probably not a
big concern/requirement for this project.  Firewire devices all run through
the FFADO layer and they actually have a list of supported devices:
http://www.ffado.org/?q=devicesupport/list

Obviously any of those would work, but I wasn't sure if your workstation
had firewire or not.

On Mon Dec 29 2014 at 1:09:46 AM Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at laiskiainen.org>
wrote:

> On 12/29/2014 09:07 AM, William W. Austin wrote:
> >
> > My wife composes, and for playback she has used an Audigy2 PCI card in
> > her desktop machine for years.   That computer is beyond it's last legs
> > now, and her new one has only PCIE slots.  (Yes she uses Linux for her
> > composing and playback.)
> >
> > The problem is that she uses the Midi feature of that card and has
> > sound fonts that she loads (about 126 MB in size) into it.  She has
> > given up trying to find one and has asked me to help... but so far I've
> > struck out.
> >
> > Are there ANY PCIE sound which is roughly the equivalent of the Audigy
> > 2 cards?   I won't say "money is no object", but I'm approaching the
> > point where cost is less important than finding such a card if on
> > exists.
> >
> > Any pointers on this issue will be greatly appreciated.
>
> One possibile option that sort of side-steps the problem might be a PCIe
> - PCI adapter, such as
>
> http://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/Slot-Extension/PCI-
> Express-to-PCI-Adapter-Card~PEX1PCI1
> http://www.beaglesoft.com/pcie2pci.htm
>
> Mind you I dont have any experience with such products, and then there's
> the question of whether the lot actually fits in the chassis at all.
>
>         - Panu -
> _______________________________________________
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> music at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music
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