external sound card for laptop with microphone entry

[mutzik57]

Hi all,

I'm part of an association wich gives some musical concerts, and the money we receive is for buying some medical material for our local hospital. We ask doctors and nurse what the needs are.

So back to this subject, I've discovered grandorgue, it's really more than nice, so I've planned to give some organ concert with that tool

but :
- I want to add some reverb to Pitea MHS (great work, thx)
- need to have an external sound card to plug 2 microphones (symetric if possible) and also a CD (line input)
- laptop is available (ACER Aspire pro) with win 7 and 4Gb ram

If you have some advice for me, I tried already jackaudio with savihost (freereverb3) but always freeverb crashes after a few seconds ???:crazy:

Thanks for all replies

 

[wehtam721]

Hello,

I haven't used external sound cards much as I've always used the built in sound card with GrandOrgue, so I'll let somebody else address that issue.

Regarding the reverb, I tried for some time to get reverb working with jackaudio and wasn't ever able to do it. The wonderful people that work on GrandOrgue, however, have built reverb directly into the software now so I just use the built in reverb now and it works great. You can find the reverb controls by clicking on "Midi & Audio Settings" in the "Audio/Midi" menu. There's a tab in that settings dialogue labeled "Reverb". All you need to do is check "Enable Convolution Reverb" and then browse for an impulse response file on your computer.

There are lots of free IR files available here: http://www.voxengo.com/impulses/. I particularly like some of the IR files in their "IM Reverbs Pack 1".

When you check the box for "Enable Convolution Reverb", it may give you a warning message saying that the feature isn't supported, but it works great and, in my experience, you can pretty safely ignore this warning. If you don't have the reverb option available as a tab in your settings window, you probably need to download a newer build of GrandOrgue which can be done at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ourorgan. Just click on the "Files" tab, click on the "Testing" folder and download the installer which is appropriate for you.

I hope that helps a little bit. Let me know if anything here doesn't make sense and I'll try to explain it better. I'm sure some of the other users here will be able to give you some thoughts about your sound card needs too.

Take care,
Matt

 

[L.Palo]

Hi!

There's been a discussion about soundcards before (http://www.magle.dk/music-forums/17490-soundcard-choosing-multi-channel.html) where external soundcards (especially for consumer grade laptops) wasn't really recommended for various reasons. I'd personally say that it very much depends on your expectations. USB connected soundcards can certainly be used (as I've frequently done that myself) but some might complain that ultra-low latency cannot really be expected from them (mostly due to internal buffers). Personally I've not been so much bothered by it but most of the time I use the built-in soundcards for playback instead anyway.

When sampling (recording) though, I've frequently used an external USB soundcard with great results. I've got an Alesis iO|2, it's unfortunately not available anymore (but M-Audio has a new USB soundcard - M-Track - that's pretty much identical to it from casing to specs), that's got two mic inputs (line level if you so want) with phantom power supply. EMU has made some recommended soundcards too (like the 0404) but I've not used them myself as their Linux support seems not too good...

While firewire devices seem to generally be considered better alternatives (for pro audio) their function on consumer grade laptops is questioned (see thread above). I've never tried any so I cannot really comment it though.

What it in my opinion eventually boils down to is what you intend to do with the soundcard. For playback I'd recommend you to stick with the built in version as it will likely work just fine, but if you intend to do recordings (of other things than your GO playing) then an external soundcard could definitely come into question.

Kind regards

Lars P

 

[e9925248]

Just one note on Linux and Firewire:
You should check, if the device is supported by the kernel (ALSA) or a user space driver. (eg. for Fireware MIDI, the kernel only supported 1-2 devices, that last time I checked), as not every programm supports the user space drivers.

 

[Ghekorg7 (Ret)]

Hi Mutzik57 !
Thanks for using Pitea !

Jack for windows is a great solution to add reverb to GO (though latest builts have the "unsupported" convolution reverb feature on...).
Just replace Freeverb3 with ReverberateLE (32bit !! > use 32bit savihost)
Teru has told me that he has no 64bit environment to work so he maybe missed some things when creating the 64bit vst version of Freeverb3 (it crashed on Reaper too)
So,
as I have an Acer 64bit win7 lap here :

Use Jack 1.9.9.5 64bit version with which we can open both 64 & 32 bit apps at the same time
Use 64bit GO
Use ReverberateLE (x86) through a Savihost x86 NoKeyboard ;-)
Use Asio4all instead an external soundcard. The internal RealTek soundcard found on almost every Acer lap is just fine. Also you can set it at 24/48000 for great sound

I'm using Pitea like this too.

Thus you finally got : Organ console > Midi to USB > Lap(Jack/GO/LE/Asio4all) > Audio system . Simple and HQ sound.

Have Fun !
Best
Panos