Can anyone recommend a good budget sound card for home music production?

Question

Or maybe even one that's a few years old, that's really good, that I can find on eBay used?

Answer 1

M-audio makes the best pro cards for home prices. I know this from running 3 different University electronic music studios.

Answer 2

Soundblaster (Creative) have always had quality sound cards for different models and flavours of PC. The best you could get now cost less than a $100 (Au) and plugs into a USB port so you don't even need to fiddle around in the guts of your machine. Check out the link supplied below. Good luck!

Answer 3

discover out which pc chip on the marketplace is optimal for operating different strategies, inclusive of the audio production software that you recommend to apply. Load up on reminiscence. Audio production software calls for a straightforward quantity of RAM, so that you would possibly want to be particular to contain a good number of it on your laptop. in case you recommend to save the info you take advantage of on your pc, particularly than on an exterior force, you'll choose an highly tremendous puzzling force. in case you want to list into the laptop with XLR or a million/4 inch cables, you are able to prefer to apply exterior equipment to finish that. this would frequently be linked through USB or Firewire ports, yet no longer internally. %. a suitable sound card. if you're recording to at least something except the laptop, there are distinct ideas to move the info onto the laptop for production. for most makes use of, the generating unit a million/8 inch headphone and microphone inputs will move audio fairly properly. in the journey that your recording is already on a pc, you are able to move the info as you'll the different document, through CD, puzzling force, FTP, or digital mail.

Answer 4

Creative Labs has several versions Starting with the Live! on up. Look at the Audigy or 24bit cards. Some are not that expensive. Make sure it's a version that has the input/outputs you need.

Answer 5

all creative sound cards are decent. the audigy 2 ZX platinum is very good and it has inputs (one mic in, one stereo audio in, one optical in, one digital coax in, and a MIDI in, also matching outputs) it was a $200 card, but now the the X-Fis have come out they have dropped in price. al kinda cool you get a IR remote and a suite of music editing software (pretty basic)