Hi,
I’m using Renoise on my laptop though headphones and just wondered if an external soundcard would improve the sound significantly enough to buy one?
Is the slowness I sometimes get when I have a lot of things playing at once due to the soundcard or something else relating to the laptop? Memory, etc…
Thanks.
Unless the builtin soundcard is VERY crappy, or has buggy drivers or something, I’d assume the limiting factor is CPU… of course it’s hard to tell from here for sure, but that would be my guess.
true.
another tip - if you do buy external - dont buy presonus - their drivers never worked on vista without serious tweaking, and they released their win 7 driver 2 weeks ago.
meh.
+1
i currently run renoise on an acer aspire laptop,and run it through an m-audio fast track pro on windows7and avlinux.
i know nobody likes m-audio but i have had flawless operation w/renoise and live,fl studio.
and my krk monitors rock.i like monitors better than headphones.but its all about preferences every one has em.
hope this helps a little.
Rick 
Thanks for the replies, gentlemen.
what brand has their drivers well woriking in win 7? seems like there’s a lot of probelms with win 7. :<
I had a few troubles with my Delta 66 (not external) and the onboard thingy too under Win 7 first with occassional crackles, even if no CPU load was present but could fix these now. Win7 seems much more sensitive to EIST and C1E state changes causing crackles than XP, where i never had problems with that. Disabling these settings in the BIOS solved it for my Delta 66 in Renoise using ASIO. To solve the crackles with my onboard sound i’ve simply uninstalled the crappy Realtek driver and use the standard one by Microsoft now, which delivers crystal clear sound. If you can’t live without the power saving feature, there is a way to get RMClock working under Windows 7, even 64bit, which can take care of that. I’ve written a small script to start Renoise, which basically sets my CPU to full performance mode first and back to performance on demand when closing Renoise. M-Audio also has a small problem with the ASIO panel not opening out of a host under Windows 7, but this can be fixed easy too.
thanks for the tips! will try using that ms driver on my laptop.