Sound Cards

I read alot of post of peeps on here knockiong the SoundBlaster cards. ok. I have an emu APS, uses the exact same chip as the sound blaster and I have never had any trouble, 1/4" ins and outs (4 in 2 out 2 digi RCA in 2 digi RCA out)
the midi is done for me by a Midiman 2x2 usb interface, and its rock solid.
the sound quality is rock solid and the effects are nice, and I gots the ASIO drivers.

its fixed at internal 48khz sample rate but thats no biggie with good daw programs for recording (CEP 2.0 4 xample) , but I have no problem recoding at 48khz and converting to 44.1 at mixdown, so if you got an mpc 4000 no goodski, but its a nice piece of soundcard for less then 50 bux.

granted the EMU APS Is like the "advanced" version of the SB live platinum but it has much nicer hardware, the d/a a/d converters are mad proper, the 1/4 inch inputs are real low noise. I can only record 4 tracks at once, but so what? I usually go one at a time anyway. ( a hold over from my tascam portastudio days)

basically, you dont gotta have the super dopest soundcard to get a good sound. BAsically the APS was emu's last foray into soundcard design and its a dope piece of gear. check some of the stuff on the emu site out. It has 2 built in midi synths (soundfonts) but I never use them, but you can.

Could be the rep they had prior to the audigy upgrade. Prior to this up grade I could not do any tracking of over 30 tracks with realtime Effects and or soft synths at the same time. Maybe for me it was a lack of knowlege on putting a PC togther and the proper tweeks. But Sound Blaster has since got thier stuff together SPDIF & all. The idea of sound fonts are dope and with awave you have the ultimate prospect of an all in one studio with your computer. DR. FOO post on my thread of what sofware you use & why. Give some knowlege to those who are looking for their style and options available. I am sure it's been covered but only in peices. I am new to this forum but have alot of studio experience. What good is experience if you don't share. I found those who are not willing to share base thier small & minute skills one or two tricks. Out side of that they suck but the one willing to share is a river of knowlege becuase he always learns something while teaching.
2 all Lets keep it simple as far as tech terms if posible so we don't loose the begginers.
Pe@ce.

Word,
ps the info I have here comes from one of my college buddies who works @ creative labs.

ok, I the aps is different then the soundblaster, but in small , but significant ways. there is a dedicated piece on the card that does the effects, so it dont tax the cpu at all, its all done in the card internally.
The synth's are 1 soundfont synth and one midi synth.
the soundblaster series uses the same emu101sk or whatever they call that chip. It was developed for use in the APS and in the SB Live series.

I have songs where I've done 40-50 tracks and had no problems.
perhaps the reason you are having trouble is you are using a heavy cpu taxer like cubase. Running vst's has nada to do with the sound card (well not nada but as far as we are concerned, nada) I do all my stuff in CEP (tracking) and do everything else on outboard gear.
so if you are running cuabase on a p4 1ghz w/ 256 mb ram, you will eat up processing power real fast by using lots of vst's and realtime effects.

If you want to use realtime efx. try cool edit pro 2.1, hands down the best DAW/multitracker software out right now.
CEP is built from the ground up as DAW software, and is mad reliable, mad stable and has features designed to not tax cpu processing speed. I use a P3 733 with 640 mb ram and I have zero problems and no crashes (knock on wood).

try resampling tracks with effects and bouncing them down as you go to save processor power.

30 tracks of stuff w/ realtime effects and vst's can really tax the processor speed. Most systems running say cubase sx, need to have a fast (p4 2.X) processor and tons of ram to be able to get it popping.
Maybe you could eliminate some of the vst's by using reason? or maybe you could shift to some more outboard gear like a sound module?

Dr. Foo Cool Edit is a fantastic piece of software. I had used it when it was Cool Edit 1.53 I loved the fact that you were able to get out the unwanted noise. This is what got me into computer music making. The computer i had when I used a sound blaster was an AMD 400MHz w/486 meg ram or close. At the time I was still in the infancy stage but was pushing the system. My tracking software was cakewalk. I never used cool edit as a tracker. Now I have an AMD xp1700 w/ 786MHz ram. I tried a test with nuendo (the software I now use) and got 105 tracks with 8 effect sends running verbs VST & DX also compressors and what ever I thought was ram intensive, running in real time. I stopped at 105 becuase I grew board and it was only a test. But back to cool edit it has something called convelution that is like Sonic Foundry's accoustic mirrors. Litterally you can take the artifacts of a Stauder lets say then apply the charicturistics to your mix and the cold feel of the digital realm sounds as thoughyou recorded with a higher end analog deck. I have been experimenting and the results are stunning. I can honestly say you can use an audigy card mix your song track by track with what ever recording software you have and get results that only a seasond pro using critical listening skills can determin if it is high end anolog or not.

very true. The old adage "you get out what you put in" applies to music 100%.

Many people hate CEP, simply becasuse of its name and the "cartoonish" interface, which is why the cep 2 looks way diff. then cep 2. also cep adds alot of acid esque looping features. 1 thing I can say, cep has always had the nicest effects. period. They are just proper. nicer then cakewalk or cubase by far.

basically cep is the Mustang, the "forgotten muscle car" of DAW software.