Musician & Gamer

Hello All,

I was hoping that you all might be able to help me. My quandry is that I'm in the market to purchase a new soundcard for my computer and from browsing on-line I've come up with a significant amount of contradictory opinions.

The two cards I am interested in are the Creative Audigy Platinum eX and the Hercules Game Theater XP. Now as I stated in the subject, I am a musician and a gamer and I am looking for....

1.) A card that satisfies my needs as a gamer.
2.) Will give me some ability to experiment with digital home recording of guitar, vocal, and keyboards.
3.) Won't break the bank.
4.) Can easily run a digital out to my stereo system for mp3 playback

Now from the little information I've garnered from the web, the GTXP satisfies 1,3, and 4 nicely. Point 2 on the other hand has been hard to pin down. In fact, I've seen many posts saying that both cards suck and that they both rock. What do you all think?

Also, an alternative I am considering is purchasing a Boss BR-8 digital 8-track (unless someone knows of something better for under $500) and simply running a line out to the computer for storage and maybe even later editing. Is this a better solution.

Sorry, if I sound like an idiot, but I'm really a smart guy, just not when it comes to this atuff.

The GTXP is a better card, but ASIO2 and Sounfonts2 are very handy for hobby musicians. I think there is some soundfont program for GTXP, but it only runs soundfonts v1 so it's getting a little old. I am not sure if SF2 will be supported in the future or if it's at all possible. The midi part of GTXP is really bad and the drivers don't make them any better (latency often 40+). Alternatively you could buy a dedicated sound board (Maudio, terratec etc,) and a gaming board on the side. If you're serious about music making (meaning willing to spend for that little extra) there are several excellent boards out there for around 2-300 bucks you can get high polyphony count, 24/96 and hardware DSPs from several companies. I can give you more specific recommendations if you tell me the features you need, (and those you want, but don't need

Dev

Just because people are following me does not mean I'm paranoid!

As an alternative, have you checked out these cards?

<A HREF="http://www.audiotrak.net/eng/index.html" target="_new">Audiotrak</A>

Patrick Schmid right here at THG had some very nice things to say about the <A HREF="http://www4.tomshardware.com/video/01q4/011130/index.html" target="_new">Maya 7.1 Gold</A>.

Toejam31

<font color=red>My Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new"><font color=green>Toejam31's Tantalizing Tantric Toy</font color=green></A>
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