Originally Posted By: Simon - PG Music
An audio interface likely won't make a significant difference to your sound quality, and won't make the type of difference that I think you're talking about. An audio interface will improve the sound over your Soundblaster, but it won't fundamentally change the sound. What kind of changes do you want - better instrument sounds?

What I think you would want to do, for the MIDI tracks at least, is load up your favourite VST instruments in Band-in-a-Box (or export the MIDI to a DAW for that same purpose).

For the Realtracks, you could use EQ or compressor plugins on them to adjust how they sound, but as they're audio recordings you won't be able to use instrument plugins on them.



Yep.... digital is pretty much digital. The big differrence is that the old soundblaster cards used the windows default synth which had some horrible sounding midi patches in it. And the soundblasters are not designed to run a good audio driver and mostly rely on MME as opposed to allowing ASIO to be used. The problems show up when one is trying to run a few softsynths and audio at the same time. The soundcard or interface is like the foundation to the house. Everything working and running properly is based on that foundation.

I like to encourage anyone who is serious about recording music in their computer to make the investment in a solid interface. It makes everything so much easier and enjoyable.

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