Sound Card Advice?

[Tav]

Hey. Wondering if those in the know can give me a pointer in the right direction.

I now have:

Pro Tools LE with MBOX 1

fxpansion BFD Drum Module

Native Instruments Guitar Rig 2

External 300 Gb Audio Drive

Problem is when I use Guitar Rig / Pro Tools / BFD I get a lot of clicks and lag. I'll put this down mainly to the shitty sound card I have in my PC? I am getting a general upgrade in future...new mobo/processor etc etc.

What I was wondering was what cards are good for low latency monitoring? I don't really need lots of in/outs for recording as I have the MBOX for recording. I would like to be able to use Guitar Rig as a stand alone program with minimal latency....un-noticeable should be possible. BFD just doesn't work with my current card <works on newer PC in the living room>.

Pro Tools wasn't good for monitoring at all but this would be down to the PC as it does it's own shizzle.

Any help much appriciated!

[threeornothing]

Try a different sequencer, seriously. PT is just a system hog. USB is also bad for audio, has been a headache for me, but I have beaten the clicking/stuttering/jittering and am down at 6ms latency. What sort of spec is your machine?

All LE versions of Pro Tools really hog the CPU for no apparent reason (I have set up sessions in my PT which I have had running on Cubase, and I can't load half as much plug ins, its all a con to make you think buying a 10 grand DSP accelerator card (ie. Pro Tools HD3) is the only solution)....if you can make the trade off in plug ins (those bomb factory plugs do sound fantastic, loving the 1176 and LA2 stuff just now) look into an MAudio card possibly, or the EMU range. I've just gone for the EMU1212M, but the EMU0404 is identical at about half the cost, and is just missing the ADAT capability I'm needing. My other choice in my budget was the MAudio 1010LT...of course I could hack together pro tools TDM with this card (hehe) but it just wasn't that worth it for the sake of getting a limited card for some nice sounding plug ins in pro tools .... Maybe one day I'll get a UAD powercore card

BFD eats up a lot of juice....I didn't even think of running that until I was up to 1 gig RAM. My PC is only 1.6ghz though...could be done with a better CPU. Basically, more CPU, more RAM, cool ASIO soundcard like the emu0404 and you should run Guitar Rig no problem. I ran it no problem on my laptop with an Maudio USB sound card, and people are offering me £50 for the same laptop....fat chance

If you didn't shell out big bucks for Guitar RIg 2, look into Guitar Combos by the same company, just three small combos (ac30, marshall jcm combo and a fender deluxe or something) sounds great...minimal CPU usage. I can get about 6 going in cubase (or about 3 in pro tools!!!!)

Also for drums, if you have Reason, look into Reason Drum Kits 2, some of them sound pretty good!! Less hassle than BFD.

Have you got all the BFD add on CD's? (Deluxe and XFL?) What do you think?? :S Not totally convinced here.....

[iain44s]

how fast is the pc? if you are using the mbox then the soundcard inside the pc surely wont matter as its not being used?

have you tried adjusting the buffer size? often the cause of clicks and pops. think you can do this in the digidesign hw control panel (i think...not particularly familiar with pt stuff.)

[Tav]

I only got Pro Tools as someone was selling it on here for £100 and from what I had read it was good. I am sure I can get it working well. The system upgrade should help.

I dunno if I would have been better getting an M-Audio version of pro tools...or the card and using something else althogether.

I saw the Combo version of Guitar Rig. I got Guitar Rig on torrent so I could try before I buy basically. I really like what I heard <which wasnt much> and the interface.

I will look into the emu0404...really I think getting a good asio card will help me with Guitar Tracks and possibly recording if I can aquire a different sequencer.

Midi keyboard + interface is the next issues so I can use reason...so much stuff to try and pick up on. Really don't want to buy expensive/shit gear....do you have MSN Keilan? Perhaps I could add you and you could give me some advice on a set up?

[spellchecker]

if you want to get a quick MIDI setup, the best way is probably to get a newish keyboard from ebay - the recent midi keyboards have an interface built in, and just plugin with USB - Reason will just see it as a single midi device i think. of course they still have midi ports on em too.

now the only thing is to choose a keyboard! do you want a playable one for keyboard stuff, i.e 49, 61 or even more keys, or do you just want a 2 octave bad boy to do stuff with live?

to be honest if it's just for playing with synths and doing live stuff, i'd go for a small two octave thing - purposeful, practical and they look cool! however, if you want to play 2 hands at a time for piano pieces or whatever, then probably get at least a 49 key, or ideally a 61 key.

m-audio/evolution make good eens.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/M-Audio-Radium-49-Keyboard-MIDI-Controller_W0QQitemZ7402238685QQcategoryZ14987QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

^^^^ there's a nice 49 key jobbie - it also has faders and pots which you can midi assign in Reason - meaning you can fiddle with synth settings without moving a mouse about - very handy.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/M-Audio-O2-USB-Midi-Keyboard_W0QQitemZ7401647844QQcategoryZ14987QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

^^^^ and there's a nice shorty, it has assignable pots too by the look of it.

[Dazza1040]

Asio4all did the trick for me.

I have now got 6 x mono line ins or 3 x stereo line ins.

This was done using asio4all driver and 3 different sound cards.

All soundcards are made into 16bit using the asio4all program.

Asio4all also lets me get the latencey for midi using vst programs such as bfd and the grand 2 down to real time playing. So now i can record my roland dt6 electric drum kit through midi using bfd as the sounds in real time.

All done using Sonar 5.

Just in case you want to know it also gives me 14 x mono lines out or 7 x stereo lines out.

Spec P4 3ghz , 1 gb ram , 200g hard drive and 80g hard drive. Running Windows xplite