Help choosing a soundcard to produce / record / monitor / mix with FL Studio?
2008/08/06, viewed 12008 times
To help answer a very common question that is posted time and time again on the forums, Scott Fisher with the help of other posters on Looptalk has compiled the following Soundcard FAQ. It answers common questions about different uses of soundcards as well as answers common questions about topics such as latency, ASIO, multi-client drivers, sound monitoring, etc.
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It's difficult to make specific card recommendations given that soundcard manufacturers update hardware and drivers on a regular basis. This FAQ therefore considers the main issues to ponder in your search for sound-card Nirvana. It?s up to you to make sure the card you select is up to the job. Posting a question in the FL loop-talk forum will usually give you a quick answer.
Sound quality: For FL Studio based music making, the only time your sound card will affect the sound quality of your final rendered tracks is if you have used recordings or samples made with it in your track.
Do you record your own samples/sources? Yes/No?
No: Then you are probably ripping samples from CD, using sample CD?s , downloading sounds off the internet and playing with plug-in instruments. When you render your final track in FL your sound card plays no part in the process. SBLive/Audigy/Terratec whatever ? it really won?t make any difference to you. Save your money for VSTis and FL plugins, stick with the soundcard your PC shipped with.
Yes: If you are recording quick one-shot samples, in a mix - the quality of a basic SBLive recording will probably be more than sufficient. If you are recording live instruments and vocals and have decent quality mics and outboard gear then you should look carefully at a soundcard with good specifications and preferably a break-out box for connecting all your sources. Expect to be paying USD $250 to $900 range for something 'good'.
That said, people do achieve good results using humble SoundBlaster Live cards with good external gear (the trick is to feed clean line level signals into the card so amplification of low level sources are done outside the PC), it's probably wiser to upgrade only after you have exhausted the possibilities of the card and understand how it?s limiting your sound. It?s an all too common human failing that we rush out and waste money on technology in the hope of fixing a problems that we don?t fully understand. Witness the explosion in ?mastering rack-mount units and plug-ins? of recent years.
Do you play VST?s and control FL via a MIDI keyboard or MIDI controller? Yes/No?
Quick word on latency: This is the delay between you playing a note, tweaking a knob etc and the action happening (ie. actual sound or effect being produced). Less is better, but after you drop below 20 ms you will find it harder to tell the difference between settings. For reference, it takes about 2 ms for the mechanical clack of your PC keyboard to reach your ears and about 10 ms for the sound of the drummer to reach you from the other side of the room?are you having trouble with lip sync in every day conversations? :-) ? just asking.
Yes: Then the lower the latency you can get the better, to a point, 10-15 ms as good as most people need, achieve 2-5 ms and you are at the cutting edge of what is possible/required.
Trying to get low latencies out of the standard sound driver will push your hardware to the point of the sound breaking up in FL (but you know this already the ? ?buffer length setting? changes the latency). 15 to 30 ms is typical with standard drivers. The best way to achieve really low latencies is with ASIO capable cards. The cheapest way to get ASIO is 3rd party drivers (KX) with a SB Live, see http://kxproject.spb.ru/index.php?skip=1 Next up is probably an Audigy gamer (however it only runs ASIO at 48K. Why is this an issue? There are a few 3rd party plugs, hard to find actually, that will play out of tune or make strange noises at this sample rate. Be assured that from FL V3.56 onward FL and all associated plug-ins are 48K ASIO compliant).
No: Then you are silly ? buy an Evolution or Oxygen 8 product ASAP, stop mucking around!
see - www.evolution.co.uk/ or www.midiman.net/products/midiman/oxygen8.php
Do you need to simultaneously record and play from the same soundcard?
Yes: Then you need to make sure that your soundcard is ?Full duplex?. Most modern soundcards are full duplex, and it should be considered essential if you want to record anything from an external source whilst FL Studio (or any other App) is playing. Be aware that if you use ASIO some soundcards won?t operate in full duplex mode while using ASIO mode. Check carefully with previous owners if this is important to you.
No: Be happy in the knowledge that you have less cables hanging out the back of your PC.
Does anything other than FL Studio need to access your soundcard at the same time?
Yes: Then make sure your card is ?Multi-client? capable. This is the ability of a Soundcard to playback audio streams from multiple separate client applications, like, say, Acid and Reason at the same time. All modern soundcards should be capable of this, however ASIO again may cause some problems here, if ASIO and Multi-client support are important don?t forget to check the card of your dreams can do it in ASIO mode.
No: Are you sure? Not even outlook saying - ?you?ve got mail?? You need to get a life and some friends.
SoundFonts, do you want to use them? Yes/No?
A quick word on SoundFonts (SF): SF cause all sorts of confusion because originally Creative developed them and they only worked on Creative hardware. Fortunately Today there are ?software? SF players that take the SF data and let you play the sounds on any PC. The FL Studio SF player is excellent and should be on your shopping list. For those who don?t know - a soundfont is just another multi-sample format. For example a good Piano SF will be a collection of many WAV files that are layered by velocity and split by note number. A SF may alternatively contain all the instruments of the orchestra. See www.thesoundsite.net the FL demo SoundFont player that comes with FL will allow you to demo the sounds.
Yes: If you have a Creative card you will have the added options of loading them into hardware, saving some CPU cycles (although most the FL SF player is easy on the CPU) and using the Vienna SoundFont Studio package - this allows you to edit and create your own SFs. Vienna SF Studio that comes free with Creative cards or can be downloaded from their website. If your card isn?t Creative brand then you will need the FL Studio SF player or a 3rd party one. Get the Fruity SF player, it?s designed to work seamlessly with FL, you know you want it.
No: Come on, everybody needs SF?s. Download some from www.thesoundsite.net and check them out on the FL Demo SoundFont player. Just think about how professional your tracks will sound with a 24 Meg piano SF cutting through the mix, do it now! You know Reason users are laughing at your wimpy default FL Piano samples behind your back?time to get even.
Recording your mix: As the FL Studio manual points out, the live FL mix you can hear through your sound card does not reveal the true audio potential of the program. In order to keep processor overheads sensible the live FL mix uses a Linear interpolation (see FL manual for detail) that provides real-time playing at the cost of some quality/fidelity of the sound. Don't record the live output from your soundcard, remember - you can't polish a turd, render your tracks and then your turds will sparkle :-)
The best rendered sound quality comes from the WAV format (remember CD is 44.1 kHz 16 Bit). MP3 format is best reserved for sharing files on the internet or for your MP3 player. If you are going to burn to CD it is wise to render to 44.1 kHz 16 Bit WAV files and critically listen to the result (it can sound slightly different compared to the live output).
Also remember your ability to hear the mix correctly will be affected by your speakers, amplifiers, cabling and PC noise. Ideally you should aim to have a good quality external amplifier and speakers and a good pair of headphones (use both to monitor your final mix, live and then to check the rendered version). The sky is the limit here, however for most applications good quality home hi-fi gear will serve the purpose, so long as you know the limitations of the speakers. The assumption is that if you are reading a FAQ on FL sound issues then you aren't ready USD $10,000 worth of monitoring, who is? :-)
In terms of PC noise a visit to www.quietpc.com will put you on the path to serenity.
So what monitor speakers should I buy?
Answer 1: Colour free: One that does not significantly colour the sound (colour = lumpy frequency response and or speaker box/component resonances - knock on the speaker and listen). If your monitor has big lumps and dips in the frequency response then you are likely to compensate for these in the Mix/EQ settings, which will probably lead to a shock when you hear it on another system. Murphys law of mixdown states that - "A mix will always sound worse when tested on a system other than that on which it was originally made". :-)
Answer 2: Everything is coloured: All speakers colour the sound (just some more than others). You don't have to pay mega-bucks to get nice neutral speakers, there are a lot of speakers in the USD $250-1000 range that will do very nicely. Computer monitors won't do, sorry.
Answer 3: A good mix is possible with even very 'coloured' monitors, so long as you know what that colour is and can compensate for it. In fact this is probably one of the most important aspects of good mixing, getting to know the sound of your gear and how that translates to other systems. Pick a CD with a sound that you like and listen to it on your mix-down system...try to recreate that sound in FL.
