External Sound Cards?

[DeanOakley]

Not meaning to hijack the thread but, I'm also looking for an external sound card purely for recording mixes as my laptop doesn't have a line in.

Not looking to spend anything over £30 really, can anyone suggest a decent one. I'm finding a lot but with bad reviews.....

[soundinmotiondj]

Not meaning to hijack the thread but, I'm also looking for an external sound card purely for recording mixes as my laptop doesn't have a line in.

The Behringer UCA-222 card (there are several variants with the same model number) is "OK" at best. The card is $25-ish.

The reality is that almost any card will do an "OK" job for any music that is at sensible levels. I record old mix tapes and bootleg tapes (most from 25+ years ago) on a crappy tape player, and after some minor noise reduction (there is an automatic setting in Abobe Audition that I use) the results are good enough for ear buds, the car, or youtube.

If you are looking to publish your mixes as full wav / lossless...look for something better. If you want to playback your mixes for yourself to review your progress....or put them on youtube...the UCA-222 is more than good enough.

[DeanOakley]

Thanks for the reply.....I will be primarily looking to burn them to CD, would the Behringer suffice? If not, what would you recommend?

[soundinmotiondj]

Thanks for the reply.....I will be primarily looking to burn them to CD, would the Behringer suffice? If not, what would you recommend?

Who/what is the CD for? Are these for your review? Are these to "audition" for gigs? Either way, the answer is that the Behringer card will be "OK." In the end, it will depend more on the intended listening environment than anything else.

There is a great discussion about sound cards in this talk, starting about 41:20.

[DeanOakley]

The CDs will be given out to people, partly as 'audition' CDs, partly just for listening pleasure. Therefore the Behringer, in my (limited) opinion should be, as you say 'ok'.

Thank you for your help

[Jester]

Pick up a NI Audio 2 and you cant go wrong. If you do parties you will soon discover that the cheapies don't cut the mustard output wise.

[DJ Nebulous]

Well this all is pretty great. I'm glad that there are some ones out there that aren't too much. 100$ is a pretty good deal. I will def take all these into account.

Not only do I need somthing with aux sound but is there a possibility of something that could plug in to my computer via one usb and it would allow me to control ALL my equipment? Including all the kinds of audio plug ins, MIDI, headphone. That kind of thing? I used to have one when I was going to high school and i was in a music production class. I believe it was a PreSonus AudioBox. Anything comparible to that?

[Ham]

Another Hi-jack, new to all of this.

I want to run 2 studio monitors from my computer, will this soundcard be sufficient? All I need is 2 1/4" outputs right?