glen
about 1000 years ago I purchased a cd called strange new flesh by a band called colosseum 2. if you have ever heard their music, what category do you think they should be placed in, as I have better than average knowledge about music(OF COURSE NOT AS GOOD AS YOU).

a REPLY WOULD BE MOST APPRIECATED

Glen A. Baker owns Time Warp Record Store in Sydney.
Located on the corner of Clarence & Druitt Streets Sydney.
Telephone (02)283 1556 : Fax (02)283 1306.
Opened In 1988.

Hi guys.
Thought I´d give you my opinion on the question.
Up to today I´ve owned several soundcards: Turtle beach Monterey, Tropez +, Soundblaster 32Awe, Soundblaster 64 Gold, Ensoniq audio PCI, and today I own the Sound Track 128DDMA PCI. I´ve also come across the Soundblaster Live!.
Now, in my opinion the Sounblaster family really IS shit. Although it totally depends on what you want to do with the card, I´ve never experienced Creative to manufacture what they promise. As in regard to the Live! card there is a hardware malfunction on it. It´s digital I/O doens´t have more than 13 bits (cards today should at least manage 16 or 20), which has been shown by independent tests. Therefore you get a S/N at about 70-80 dB which is a catastrophy. Normally a card should give you minimum 90dB. The A/D converter hasn´t even been given a number, but I reccon it´s about 18 bits. Other crap things about the card is that the digital out only has a frequensy at 48KHz and doesn´t have a optic S/PDIF. Now maybye theese figures means nothing to you, but what they say is that the soundquality is crap. Pure crap.
Other downsides is that it hasn´t got any ram-memory of it´s own, which might seem like a smart idea (you don´t have to spend 30 dollars on ram-memory). Instead it uses the computers memory when loading soundfonts. Now, unless you don´t have 128 Meg of ram, this IS going to affect the speed of you computer, and when you record in realtime.
So, my advise is: Don´t bye a Creative card. Putting another 60$ in, will give you soooo much more for the money. Please check out the Terratec EWS 64S (at www.terratec.co.uk), or the Soundtrack 128 DDMA PCI, which I´m using and to be honest is one of the best card I´ve ever seen (at www.hoontech.com). I strongly reccomend to by either one of theese. They are using the same DREAM chip, with the differenses of the ST 128 card beeing a PCI card, (which makes it faster).
The soundquality is tip top and you can buy many external brackets for the ST 128. The terratec software sometimes looks better to work with, and can also use SF2 soundfonts (94b is the native format for both cards), which ST 128 can´t.
In case you still want to buy a Soundblaster Live!, I´ll say buy the Live!Value one, and then buy a digital bracket which Hoontech has made for the card. Then use the drivers and programs for the EMU creation studio, which you can download at their homepage (www.emu.com). It´s the same card as the soundblaster Value, but with better drivers /programs.
So, there you go. Quite some text. hope you don´t mind. I just hate seeing people just believing the advertising of big companys, and then go out buying products that can´t do what they´re suppost to.
I use Cakewalk 8.4, Sound Forge 4.5, Acid Pro, and Rebirth 1.5, and the all work fine to me.
If you have more qustions there is a discussiongroup for the ST 128 card at www.egroups.com/list/soundtrack/, and I know that Terratec has one to (look on their homepage).
Thanks for the word, and have a nice day.
Victor

: : : Hey
: : : A lot of my rebirth 1.5 tracks come up with an
: : : error saying 'error opening song file'
: : : I have lost a lot of my best tracks to this error,
: : : I was wondering if anyone can give me some advice how
: : : to fix them? or are they lost phorever likes?

: : : Thanks - Aaron

: : It's a well known problem with that "Error opening song file"
: : it appears when you use to open your songs without making any changes and then when you close rebith then all the recently opened songs (four of them) are getting corupted
: : there is no way of fixing the problem so I can just say "though luck" try finding the ReBirth 2.0 or 2.01 they are hard to find but they are all worth it.

: : peace...

:
: Actually the latest versions are easy to find - just go to <a href="http://www.propellerheads.se/">www.propellerheads.se</a>

Yeah... If you want to pay for them!!!