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fireworks_god
Sexy.Butt.McDanger



Registered: 03/12/02
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USB Sound Card/Audio Interface Confusion
#14484262 - 05/20/11 12:49 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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Here's the deal: When we got good laptop, we were thinking we'd finally be able to get further with composing our own music. We were working on all kinds of cool ideas in Fruity Loops, but, inevitably, a couple minutes in or a few too many instruments at once, the playback would get fucked with all the skips and crackling sounds and everything like that. So we got a laptop with much more RAM, a much better processor, etc., to of course find that this computer is even more handicapped from this point of view. And, of course, the problem is that, being a laptop, it doesn't have a good enough sound card.
We read into it and found out that the solution is to get an external sound card, via USB. But we've been searching around and I'm pretty confused now because a lot of the results we are finding are more along the lines of audio interfaces, in that they have all the jacks for microphones, guitars, MIDI, all kinds of pre-amp controls... but what I want to know is if they'll also work as a sound card? Meaning, of course they're going to do great processing the incoming sound from the guitar or the keyboard, but is the device actually going to play the role of a sound card, with a program like Fruity Loops sending it's data through it?
Here's a couple of examples of these audio interfaces in question:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Native-Instruments-Kore-1-Hardware-USB-Midi-Soundcard-/290485560891?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43a249e63b http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Presonus-Audiobox-USB-Audio-Interface-Audio-Box-NEW-/140540348917?pt=UK_Consumer_Professional_RL&hash=item20b8db89f5 http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/M-AUDIO-MOBILE-PRE-USB-AUDIO-INTERFACE-NEW-/200605761423?pt=UK_Consumer_Professional_RL&hash=item2eb508ff8f http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/emagic-a62M-usb-soundcard-mac-pc-including-drivers-/200607002827?pt=Midi_Controllers&hash=item2eb51bf0cb
We did some reading about this from Google but apparently it's all the more confusing as terms such as "audio interface" are used very ambiguously... 
Any advice is appreciated!
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CosmicJoke
happy mutant



Registered: 04/05/00
Posts: 10,848
Loc: Portland, OR
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Re: USB Sound Card/Audio Interface Confusion [Re: fireworks_god]
#14485728 - 05/20/11 06:07 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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Mine does playback, I have an m-audio fastrack pro... I have my audio engine speakers hooked up to it through its RCA outputs, i use it for all audio pc purposes...
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Satyapriya



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Re: USB Sound Card/Audio Interface Confusion [Re: CosmicJoke]
#14508195 - 05/25/11 02:20 AM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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Yeah man, an audio interface does it all. I have worked with computers and been recording for awhile now, and the best audio interface I've come across is the Edirol Ua-25. Very easy to install, plus they've updated all the drivers on the website so it works with any windows operating system.
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eve69
--=..Did Adam and ...?=--



Registered: 04/30/03
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Re: USB Sound Card/Audio Interface Confusion [Re: fireworks_god]
#16210178 - 05/10/12 02:17 PM (11 years, 9 months ago) |
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So for an audio interface you want something 24 bit and people love Focusrite, but personally I think a cheap mixer like the one from Mackie will be better.
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Sillicybin
Registered: 02/14/05
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Re: USB Sound Card/Audio Interface Confusion [Re: eve69]
#16345785 - 06/07/12 11:11 AM (11 years, 8 months ago) |
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Unless you are really needing some good realtime processing, you don't need a new soundcard! The one you have is fine. You need to adjust your setup to output to ASIO4ALL and set your sample rate higher (try 112-256 samples/sec.)
http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_underrun.htm
Just about everyone has this issue when they first get FL Studio running. I've had it on every computer I've used it on, which included a professional Turtle Beach card.
EDIT: Oh yeah. ANY USB input device is going to introduce a bit of a delay - some are better than others, but they are all usually over 10ms, which is noticeable. It has to do A/D conversion, then transmit the data over the USB bus, which then goes to the system bus and to the processor. A PCI(e) soundcard can do the D/A conversion and push the data through the PCI bus, which is faster.
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