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morphine
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Re: Recommend me a Sound Card

Thu Apr 04, 2013 2:18 pm

MadManOriginal wrote:
...Plus, it's still better than Windows XP, right

<tangent-rant> (this tanged is not directed at you, just at the new audio API).

No, not really. In XP it was up to the soundcard drivers to take care of the mixing, and that meant that most of the time that happened in hardware, so zero-latency monitoring was norm of the day, just as you'd expect it to be ever since... 20+ years ago. Connect something to the line in, enable it in the mixer panel, poof.

However, Vista and 7 take care of mixing for you, which introduces horrible latency between input and output. Depending on the soundcard, its custom driver panel will let you use a hardware switch, but that often doesn't work and/or doesn't support multiple inputs, etc.

Furthermore, the new audio stack still made the cardinal sin of not providing a predictable-latency, proper audio API a la OSX, having us audio workers still relying on the unreliable, bug-ridden, and feature-limited ASIO crap all the time. This is one of the two main reasons why Macs still have such a strong foothold on the audio market - the second being the vanishing of Firewire ports from PCs and laptops everywhere.

And so forth I conclude: apart from having per-application volume controle, the "new and improved" audio API is a pretty much a step backwards.
</tangent-rant>
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