All of my stuff is striaght analog played to a click track, mixed in digital and mastered in digital..







Jshua

Cubase SX2 with lots of VST instruments and sampler programs.

Don't give up your PC, just buy a good sound card.
A good and reasonably priced sound card is the Audiophile 24/96, by M-Audio. The sound is good, there's no delay and it works great.

Heavenly said:

But i thought the SoundBlaster Platuim was the best soundcard, it came with a front pannel audio inputs and midi and stuff!

http://www.tascam.com/pdf/2488.pdf

- 24-track, 24-bit, 36-channel Digital Portastudio
- 3-band EQ on 24 channels, 8-inputs, tone generator and stereo bus with high and low sweepable shelving bands and full parametric mid band
- Three aux sends on all channels except the effects return
- Loop effect provides reverb, delay, chorus and more on an aux send and return
- Assignable Guitar multi-effects processor for distortion, chorus, delay, flange and more
- Up to eight assignable dynamics processors for compression during recording or mixdown
- Dedicated Stereo Compressor on the stereo output
- Eight inputs: 4 XLR with phantom power double as 1/4" mic/line inputs, plus four dedicated 1/4" mic/line inputs
- Twenty 45mm faders including master fader
- LCD display for viewing meters and edit parameters
- CD-RW drive to record Red Book CDs, import/export WAV files and backup hard drive
- 64-voice General MIDI sound module
- Standard MIDI File player
- High-speed USB 2.0 jack connects to PC or Mac® for data backup and SMF/WAV file

babar141 said:

I had that card a few years ago. no, it's definitely not the best. not even close. SoundBlaster never really made good cards for musicians, even though they claim otherwise. I had nothing but frustration from SoundBlaster's sound cards.
M-Audio are good and the price is not high. I have 2 of them, one for the desktop and one for the laptop. the sound is great, no delay, and the price is right.

Tascam has a new 24-track digital workstation out that looks to be THA BOMB.

And hell yes I would buy that if I had the clams. And a paying gig. But then again, right now, I have no use for my 10 tracks that I DO have, so, another 14 wouldn't make sense - except for that whole, 8-in thing.

WOW.

Heavenly said:

Thanks People 4 the help!! So what M-Audio card r u using then ?????

I'm using cubase SX, Reason and a PC with on-board sound now. I'm going to buy a new audio board as soon as I have some money to spend, not because of audio sync problems (which I only rarely experience a little) but just because of sound quality. It'll probably be an M-Audio. A friend is using it and it's great.
I used to have Ensoniq Paris Pro in the days I had a recording studio, which was really top-class. It had 6 DSP chips, hardware controller with faders and shuttle and eq controls and such, works on mac and pc, very versatile software patch bay (making connection to external effects a breeze), top-notch 24 bit AD/DA converters, powerful easy to use and fast software etc. Sadly, Paris is discontinued....
Before paris I used a tascam B16 16-track 1'' recorder. It sounded great, but it became a bit too expensive to maintain. It got some problems which were expensive to fix (heads and breaks got worn out. The heads were only available 2nd hand and still very expensive). But I do miss the analog sound sometimes, especially when recording drums. But only for the sound. Analog recording is a hell of a lot of a hassle compared to digital recording IMHO.
I gave up on the studio so I sold Paris, since 20 inputs + 20 outputs is kind of overkill for a home set-up.
[This message was edited Mon Apr 12 16:26:25 2004 by erikd]

erikd said:

I've never had a chance to use Paris, only heard of it. But back then I was using ProTools, which was a 20k system and sounded good.
I also used Tascam 16 Tracks 1" reel to reel machine, and yes, analog sound does have it's charms. What I might suggest is, if you work with digital now, just dump it to a 2 track 1/4" analog reel and back to the computer. I've tried that in the studio, and it does bring some of that analog sound back.
M-Audio is good, and the price is right. The work great with Cubase and I'm sure with other programs too (which reminds me that I should try the new logic, since I haven't worked on it for 10 years now). Some of their cards only work with WinXP/2000 or Mac OSX systems, so make sure thei're compatible for your system. I tried installing win98 on my laptop and found out later there's no driver for win98 with my FW-410 sound card, so back it was to winXP.