I’m getting sick & tired of the electric hum & hard-disk noise running through my internal soundcard signal in Renoise and I’m thinking of buying a small portable usb sound-card for this, obtaining better DAC’s - ADC’s / lower latency settings as a welcome extra.
Now, I only have a meager 3 usb ports on my budget laptop, of which one is used for a mouse and the other 2 for midi controllers or the occasional external HD / usb stick.
Having a gig in a few weeks, I’d like to use the new usb sound-card, plus connect the controllers and mouse, but will have to use an usb hub in this scenario.
Do any of you have experience with running multiple midi controllers (in my case BCR2000 & AKAI LPK25) through an usb hub? Possible conflicts?
What usb hub would you recommend buying?
For the cheap usb soundcard I’m contemplating the Behringer U-CONTROL UCA 222
…or the M-audio transit , although everybody on the Internet is shitting on M-audio it seems
Are there any other players I should look out for in this sound-card market segment? And if anyone here has experience with the 2 cards I listed above, I’m all ears!
edit: that should be usb hubs in the topic description!
So I bought a small 4 port Sitecom usb 2.0 hub, and things seem to run without problems atm. HAven’t decided on the soundcard yet, but this one is looking good:
I have had a problem in the past with Renoise losing midi-controller sync after some period of inactivity, like after an hour or so, twiddling the knobs suddenly don’t seem to show any midi activity. Anyone knows what can be the 'cause of this?
I have the Behringer UCA202, and to be honest, it’s a piece of crap. Handy for phono connections but the amount of noise on the thing makes it no better than the laptop’s internal sound. Nice, small drivers though that run smoothly with 48KHz, but not bothered trying anything higher.
I recently picked up the E-Mu 0404 which has a nice, solid feel. The unit is well built and the knobs don’t feel that cheap. The 0202 seems like another good option and I would strongly recommend you saved up and went for this over the behringer/m-audio units. I am yet to try out the recording inputs, but I have some faith in the specs of the E-Mu, even if it is owned by creative!
Thnx for the tips, though I made it sound worse then it probably is , only when I push the volume to maximum, without anything playing you can hear the noise-level going up. You can however hear the Harddrive at work through the audio-stream, crunching away when active. If amplified, when connected to venue rig, I bet the noise becomes more noticeable.
, although everybody on the Internet is shitting on M-audio it seems 
