The Song Fight Bulletin Board

after trying out four different consumer cards, i've landed on one that actually works with nuendo - the creative x-fi "extreme gamer." cost is $100. creative ships an ASIO driver with it and it is excellent - no clicks, pops, audio drops when you move tracks or change plugins, etc. monitors reasonably at 4ms.

it has a weird freakin layout, tho - the optical out is also the line/mic in. so if you record analog with it, you'll have to use analog outputs. i personally dgas - i figure my stereo's DACs were built 10 years ago, the x-fi's prolly not more than 3 or 4.

i just use it for mixing and doing track-at-a-time stuff thru my crappy ART tube pre.

blue wrote:creative ships a driver with it and it is excellent

The apocalypse is indeed upon us.

Isn't that the card that "Makes MP3s sound BETTER than CD quality"?

How will I know if I need this?

Funny thing, I picked up an old Audigy (original, not Audigy2) for 3 bucks at Value Village figuring it's gotta be better than the onboard audio on my kid's 'puter. I figured WTH and tried it in mine. Using Creative's own ASIO drivers, I can use live Guitar Rig/VSTi stuff at ~5ms latency with no breakups. Plus, it has a firewire port which is probably better than my onboard firewire (for when my Firepod arrives).

I mean, 3 bucks. Come on.

Puce wrote:Isn't that the card that "Makes MP3s sound BETTER than CD quality"?

yes.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:How will I know if I need this?

do you have latency problems, and are you using a cheap POS sound card? mostly i posted this because this gets asked on here once a month..

sven, i believe you @ the audigy, that's what i went looking to find. but all fry's had were the $200 ones.

Sven wrote:Plus, it has a firewire port which is probably better than my onboard firewire (for when my Firepod arrives).

Sven! This will not work!

Actually, the Audigy firewire port will work sometimes. I don't know what the problem is, but there is a big issue with that firewire port that causes the Firepod to drop out a great deal. I also encountered problems trying to use my laptop's built-in 4-pin (non-powered) port. If you search, my ranting on these subjects is somewhere in the archive.

Use your onboard, and if you have any problems with your firepod syncing, try getting a dedicated firewire pci card. They're super cheap nowadays (like $15).

I was just reading about WinXP/firewire stuff, and I don't know if it applies to me or not, but as of service pack 2, firewire support is capped at S100 (1/4 of the max IEEE 1394a speed)

There is a patch from microsoft which enables full S400 speed, I'm going to find and install it just in case. WTH would they do that for, anyway?

In an unrelated story, I discovered that if you have an Audigy card in your 'puter, and want to record using a USB mixer, you have to disable the Audigy in device manager, or you get a fuckstorm of latency, dropouts, 100% CPU usage, cracks, snapples, and pops on the USB audio device. Audigy is a greedy, possessive device.