good sound card for beginners

[Mark Stuart Burge]

The soundblaster live and live value cards work very well with linux and 
can operate at pretty low latency.


They don't need any manual configuration (apart from maybe choosing 
which channels you want displayed in your mixer)

A nice advantage with those is the ability to load soundfonts into the 
wavetable, so you don't need to run a software synth to do basic midi 
work. (obviously the quality is not professional, but it is good enough 
for composing and learning) - In fact, back in the day it was good 
enough to produce  a backing track for live performance.

Approx price on ebay would be around $10


Christopher Stamper wrote:
> What does everyone think about just using a regular pci sound card?
>
> I have a average, SoundBlaster PCI512 that Ive been using. What's the 
> downside, and how is that card any better? Besides the obvious 5.1...