Best music recording sound card?

Depends on how many inputs you want and what your source is.

I will be using a stereo microphone and one microphone input is all I will need.

Like everything else, the best costs more. Recording sound cards start cheap and go into the thousands. What is your budget?

Take a look here

I was thinking along those lines too. I use thisand this which use the firewire port as the PC input and can record sixteen channels simultaneously at 24 bit/96KHz. M-Audio and others sell inexpensive USB-interfaced A/D audio inputs like this that have a couple of channels and very good sound.

I think I am set guys. Just to try out a card I picked up one at Fry's which has all that I need. It has 24bit record and 24bit playback. Also EAX Advance HD, 5.1 - 7.1 and I couldn't be happier with the recording sound quality. This new card even beats my on board eVGA 680i HD audio that is spoken so highly of. Are you ready for which card it is? Its the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE. I picked it up for $30. Amazing sound and recording quality for the price. Cant be happier.

I use this for my computer DJ purposes gives me various mike capabilities and the ability to increase my output sound level by simply adding additional amps and speaker pairs.

The M-Audio control panel along with the sound processing my DJ software has [OtsDJ] eliminates the need for a mixer as the software and soundcard work hand in hand together, and I can direct link from the computer to the amps, eliminating some setup time.

I have discovered the inconvenient side effect of the M-Audio PCI interface just for any curious readers, the dedicated Stereo Audio PCI cards are piggy, meaning they don't or won't leave much resources for other things, you're basically turning your machine into a dedicated Stereo Audio reproducer period.

If that was your purpose as mine is with my dedicated DJ computer, then alls well, but if think you'll use this type soundcard and also playback DVDs or game forget it, but if thats what you additionally would want, the M-Audio Revolution cards would be the way to go.

One thing I'd like to say for M-Audio products, I have no complaints for the sound reproduction, it is rock solid and crystal.

Thats great Man!

Bummer. Resources like RAM and/or PCI bandwidth? Is this only a problem when the card is in use?

Bummer. Resources like RAM and/or PCI bandwidth? Is this only a problem when the card is in use?

At the time I didn't have the machine dedicated as the DJ computer, and was trying to do other things beside the DJ program, like playback a DVD, or a Media Player file, or use it as my Video Capture USB 2.0 Etc., hoping to get some other usage from the computer when it wasn't being used for DJ purposes, but trying to use those programs resulted in sound distortion preceeding a machine lockup.

It pretty much was driving me crazy until I uninstalled the M-Audio completely and installed a Creative Audigy 2 ZS I had, and the problem completely disappeared, I really didn't research deeper into it to see what the problem was, but after a reverse reinstallation and the problem returned I knew the M-Audio was behind it, so I dedicated that machine to the DJ program period using the M-Audio, as that really was why I had bought the M-Audio in the first place.

It has always had a gig of XMS Corsair RAM in that machine, so whether that or PCI bandwidth was the problem, I really do not know, but it was a problem when the card was in use, however with the DJ program its always performed flawlessly.