Connecting Keyboard (musical) to PC?

[Disaster]

Our music dept is getting some of our old PC's this summer as stand alone's which will be used to mix music. They'll be connected to the keyboard via USB.

Will a better PCI sound card improve the performance of the PC when mixing/recording etc despite the keyboard not being plugged into it, or would the keyboard need to be connected somehow to the soundcard in order to benefit from its performance?

 

cheers!

[HaleStorm]

i think to gain the benefits of the soundcard the keyboard yould have to be plugged into it with a MIDI cable, however i may be wrong and someone on here will know more about it than me and be able top guide you better

[dhicks]

Will a better PCI sound card improve the performance of the PC when mixing/recording etc despite the keyboard not being plugged into it

 

The computer will see the USB device as a MIDI controller, so any input processing will be done via that. Sound output will be done via the PCI sound card, but I doubt changing the sound card is going to help overall performance in any way - your slow computers will still be slow computers.

[Marci]

Depends. If software uses ASIO, and you're recording AUDIO as well as using Midi then yes, better soundcards will give better performance due to native ASIO drivers rather than generic. This reduces latency. In case of Cubase on PC for instance, using a USB midi keyboard to play vsti's (softsynths) you may find you press key on keyboard and sound comes out delayed significantly - decent ASIO support minimises/negates this. Look to motu and m-audio for some quality hardware. Macs are less effected by this as their core audio provides good ASIO support. Pcs can be bodged to work with ordinary hardware using the free asio4all driver.

[mole]

We use old pc's keyboards plugged straight into the mic jack and use Audacity and Cubase to record and we did have some major latency issues, had to adjust some settings on Audacity to remove it - deselecting or selecting playthrough while recording another track or something similar.