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Just to clarify, are you looking for a multi-track solution for home recording, or just looking for something better than on-board sound?(ah...it's my topic, so i don't mind)
This topic has gone far enough off that it might warrant a new thread.
Just sayin'-Edvard (January 16, 2012, 01:52 PM)
I purchased the MOTU UltraLite-MK3 Hybrid due to the added USB2 port and my need for more inputs and outputs. It appears to work perfectly fine in OS X (using FireWire), but booting into Windows, I failed to get it to work via USB on one system with Windows 7 64-bit and a Mac Pro running Windows XP 32-bit through Boot Camp. I've updated and re-installed drivers numerous times. Unfortunately I don't believe I'm alone with this issue since there are complaints about the unit's USB port on the MOTU user forums. Some people are recommending purchasing a FireWire card, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of getting the Hybrid? It's already past 30 days so I cannot return the unit (I unfortunately only discovered the broken USB functionality recently) and MOTU technical support is impossible to get to. The Phone Technical Support line is always busy and if you call the Customer Support line (which is separate), they tell you essentially to wait your turn (meaning busy signals for hours and no contact). If you want to file an online ticket, good luck on having someone look at it. MOTU does not supply PDFs of their manuals so if you lose the one you have, you are lost. I wish I hadn't bought this expensive piece of garbage.
The reason M-Audio hasn't updated is that the 2496 has been good enough or better than much of what has been out there since they came out.Interesting, thanks for the update. Yeah, the 2496 is doing fine, I really don't have any problems. The instability I described above may be caused by something else like the motherboard. So I'm still happy with the card. But my complaint was the plugin interface, I'd prefer something more modern like PCI express so I have more options of where to place it on my motherboard.
Everybody else has finally caught up, as you can find 24-bit/96kHz cards just about anywhere for a good price, although M-Audio are still THE solution for decent-quality affordable home recording.
Personally, I have been drooling for a 2496 for YEARS (now the 192... sigh), sorry to hear yours is going south.
If you just want to listen to music, Creative has been leading that pack for many years, and they've evolved WAY beyond being just a gamer's soundcard, what with their THX-enabled home-theater grade X-Fi series, among others.
I haven't personally checked out their USB offerings, but I do know that USB audio has advanced quite a bit since the early days, and you can get the X-Fi Go! for about 30-40 dollars from Amazon, or spend up to 50 or so and get the X-Fi surround that's about the same size as a small external HD.
Check the product comparison chart here:
http://www.amazon.co...SB1095/dp/B0044DEDCA
I've been told to avoid Behringer.
I have no idea what anybody else is doing, but I'm sure Sony and Phillips have something...-Edvard (January 15, 2012, 08:24 PM)
I dont know your experience with this stuff so apologize if I'm not technical enough, or too techinical!Thank you! That explanation was perfect. So it does replace the sound card essentially. I like that, I may experiment with it at work since I'm there all day long.
It's a USB DAC (Digital to Analog Converter). You plug it into your USB port and it converts audio into analog signals the line input on your stereo/receiver can reproduce through speakers (or, if you use the headphone output, directly through headphones). It requires no drivers (it's just a USB device) and you get another volume slider exclusively for it (in Win 7 at least). It takes the place of a soundcard (a soundcard on a desktop PC usually is a PCI DAC).
This device is great for boosting the audio quality output of a laptop (what I use it for). It bypasses the crappy soundcard on the motherboard and allows you to use any powered speaker or amplifier system.
It does not allow as much configurability as built in soundcards do (or did... it's been awhile since I've had one). But it works on any computer and the sound quality is fine. Here is the in-depth review I read a few years ago when deciding to get it: http://www.head-fi.org/t/456945/first-impressions-nuforce-udac-usb-dac-amp-with-line-out-and-s-pdif-out
And here is the product link to the new version:
http://www.nuforce.com/hp/products/iconudac2/
And, just to give you more options and confuse the issue, here is a wireless audio cable that uses the same principle as the uDAC above. Both are excellent in my opinion (you use these separately, they dont stack):
http://audioengineusa.com/Store/Audioengine-W1-kfitting (January 14, 2012, 06:47 AM)
kfitting, I don't quite understand how this device works. Can you help me?More expensive, but just mentioning it because I have one and it's worked extremely well for me: NuForce's Nudaq.I may give that a shot. I've never experimented with the next level of audiophile-ness, which is using a preamp like that. Preamps are one of those things that most people look at the price tag and immediately think it's BS pretentiousness. But there must be something to it, so I need to try it out.
http://www.amazon.com/NuForce-uDAC-2-Silver-Headphone-24bit/dp/B003Y5LY1C/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1323654072&sr=1-1-spell
No pressure, if you're not into audio you're probably not interested. Just throwing it out there!
(I use the nudaq from my computer into a receiver. I assume the one mentioned above would do the same. I would not expect these to power speakers directly (self-powered speakers should be fine.)-kfitting (December 11, 2011, 07:43 PM)-superboyac (December 11, 2011, 08:13 PM)
i agree. It seems like it takes more courage today just to have an OPINION, than it was before. And with the main media outlets being big businesses themselves, it leaves the ideas that circulate among the majority of the population with no public outlet (other than personal blogs, discussion forums, etc...other "raw" outlets). So all the "news" we get is all stuff that we really don't have any involvement with. Like if I go to the top stories on google right now, its all global military news, some sports, some tragedy here...and it all gets harped on constantly on TV, cable, etc. But none of this stuff has anything to do with our primary concerns right now: what is in store for my personal future? Job opportunities, education opportunities, local shopping, retirement plans, opportunities for kids, etc. This is what I see most people concerned with on a daily basis. A drone lost in Iran means nothing to us, really. We are seriously not worried about it on a personal level. Our military has plenty of money and people in place to handle that (not saying they do a good job, but it's completely out of our hands AND we have tons of other REAL things to take care of right NOW).Today, I read the EXACT SAME STORIES in the news and watch them on Youtube:-Renegade (January 11, 2012, 07:24 PM)
Did you see this? That's precisely what Winston's job was, except now it's in near-real time.
OTOH, I don't believe this is actually new. I think it's been happening all along, but now (a) it's more in-your-face, more shamelessly done, and (b) we read more about it, which is partly due to the Internet, and partly due to (a).
Oh, and (c): we may read more about it, but the institutional press has become so corporatized that it no longer takes a stand on these issues or cares about them. What was a political scandal in the 70s won't raise a brow.
Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, recently said that all the illegal actions Nixon and his henchmen took against him in 1971 are now legal. Just that, legal. And he was told by several editors that today neither NYT nor WP nor any other big newspaper would print documents like these. That's a big difference, too.-tranglos (January 12, 2012, 04:39 PM)
For those interested in the distribution graphs, it may be worth having a look at the Wikipedia article on Pareto.fascinating.
One section reads as follows:
"One of Pareto's equations achieved special prominence, and controversy. He was fascinated by problems of power and wealth. How do people get it? How is it distributed around society? How do those who have it use it? The gulf between rich and poor has always been part of the human condition, but Pareto resolved to measure it. He gathered reams of data on wealth and income through different centuries, through different countries: the tax records of Basel, Switzerland, from 1454 and from Augsburg, Germany in 1471, 1498 and 1512; contemporary rental income from Paris; personal income from Britain, Prussia, Saxony, Ireland, Italy, Peru. What he found – or thought he found – was striking. When he plotted the data on graph paper, with income on one axis, and number of people with that income on the other, he saw the same picture nearly everywhere in every era"-David1904 (January 12, 2012, 01:52 PM)
Gini coefficient trend in the US supports your observation.Yeah, that's a good question. I've just started this "research", so I'm new to all of this. But if anyone knows, please chime in.
I also wonder what is going on with the income distribution on a global scale. Any data about that?-eleman (January 11, 2012, 05:26 PM)
Seeing as superboyAC liked it (our tastes are very similar) I downloaded RightNote and gave it a pretty thorough workout today. I like it enough I think I'll buy it and start moving stuff over.Sweet! The RightNote developer seems to be open to suggestions, we should suggest this to them.
I just wish they'd do a browser (FF or Opera) plugin for it that worked like Canaware NetNotes used to work before Mozilla broke it for the 5th time.
They can do clips. But it's not the same as tossing an entire webpage into it with a single right click.-40hz (January 10, 2012, 06:31 PM)
Well, i haven't really committed to one program yet, but I'm going to start with this one. What I'm doing now is I have an area in the RN notebook where I bring all my other notes into, and then I'll re-file them from there. I don't need all my notes from other programs urgently, so unless I miss it, I'm going to leave it alone. I was able to bring in my old evernote notes with some fiddling (Evernote's restriction's, not RightNote). So I had a bunch of stuff in Evernote that I brought in. All the other ones: keynote, onenote, mybase, cintanotes...I'm leaving those alone right now. I haven't had to go back to 99% of them ever anyway. However, I have a ton of stuff in InfoQube that I'm not going to bring in because InfoQube's notes are very different that a regular notetaking application like RightNote. IQ is more of a database/spreadsheet thing and the data inside is a lot more complicated. Like, I have "interactive" data in Infoqube that is pretty sophisticated: my transcript is in there, with unit and GPA calculations that Pierre helped me with, I have Armando's project management database in there (with addressbooks, task items, and grids linking to each other), I have artist/album libraries in there. There's no way RightNote can handle stuff like that. I never used IQ as a general note collector really.I just bought RightNote today. It is currently my preferred information manager.What about all the information you've saved in other programs? Just have to guess what is where?-superboyac (January 09, 2012, 01:12 PM)-rjbull (January 09, 2012, 03:10 PM)
