I just spent the last 10 minutes re-reading the long thread concerning the hyped CreativeX-FI soundcard here in the forums.
I am struggling to determine how I want to do things.
As it stands, I have been composing music with renoise and using my motherboard’s audio with the crappiest pair of speakers you can imagine (sic); which is easily noticed when listening to many of my tracks.
I want a soundcard that is going to sound very clear and accurately represent what I have created. I plan on picking up some studio monitors soon.
I am not looking for a flame war. I have read at least a dozen reviews and they all suggest the X-FI as having better sound quality (signal to noise anyway) than the maudio cards and at a very attractive price point. Not sure if they are creative “fan-boy” sites or if there is any truth to the claims.
Would this be a good soundcard to use to monitor the output of what I am creating?
I don’t know whether I should continue eqing everything within renoise and rendering to wave or going another route.
I like the idea of doing all of the mxing internal within the computer. The idea of using analog outs and an analog mixer really seems like going backwards when I could work in digital.
Should I forget about trying the production side of things and just get a sound card with good outputs and a nice pair of monitors and just save as individual *.wavs and then pay someone to eq them for me?
My ideal situation would be some type of multi-track software I can use on the pc. Be able to open each individual rendered .wav file on it’s own track.
Freely switch between tracks on the fly and eq with some type of external breakout box of sorts with knobs. It’s so tedious making adjustments with the mouse and seems to take entirely too long.
Anything available for the computer that has some external knobs I can use to tweak certain eq ranges while listening to the tracks? Knobs of course changing the eqing of what I am listening to while switching between audio tracks and then I can render back to a single wav?
Does this sound like a smart way to go? I have a midi keyboard with a ton of knobs.
Do programs like audition, soundforge, etc. allow people to map treble, mid, bass, etc. on their midi keyboard so they can tweak in real time and just use the mouse to switch between tracks to make adjustments?
Sorry for the long post. My computer has been in storage. Kinda between places and don’t have a perminant address at the moment so I am working like 60 hours week and socking a lot of money away to move into a new place and design a new rig.
Thank for any recommendations,
Roberto