Creating Midi sounds with Sonar 8.5 producer. Best PCI express or interface?

I have an HP p6130, with AMD 9750 Quad Core, 2.4 GHz, 8 gigs of RAM, and currently running Vista 64.  I only have PCI Express slots.

I compose. The only digital input is the vocals which I am not concerned about as I do not sing that well.  However, I write all the music in midi tracks within Sonar Producer 8.5.  I need those to sound reasonably good.

I have spent days trying to figure out the right pci-e sound card or interface that will be best for creating music, only with internal Sonar midi sound tracks with synths.  I do not input midi tracks from outside sources/instruments (at least at this time).

I need to upgrade the mother board sound card that came with the computer. I am having trouble finding one that is PCI-e and that also has good drivers for Vista 64. (I could upgrade to 7?).    I also do not fully understand which of the USB or firewire interfaces would be best for "internally generated" midi tracks.  Some songs may have 15 to 20 tracks.

Does anyone have experience (good or bad) with appropriate sound cards or interfaces that are good primarily for internal midi tracks.

Further, do I need a  Analogue to Digital Converter or ADC to improve the sound going to CD burn? Will the ADC create the sound or will the sound card?  I want to replace/bypass the dedicated motherboard sound card. In other words do I need an ADC instead of a regular interface that is primarily designed for outside midi devices?

I had an older machine (died) with an older version of Sonar so I am somewhat familar with the software and some hardware.  However my understanding is limited.

For a stereo pair output of 10000 tracks in Sonar the lamest USB interface on the planet will work fine.

I pretty much agree with that. Given the scenario described, the onboard soundcard should be quite adequate. The main thing to be gained with a better interface would be lower noise (due to better analog circuitry, isolation and cables/connectors) and potentially better DAC output quality to your monitors. Also SONAR might feel a little smoother and more responsive to starting/stopping the transport if you can run a native ASIO or WDM driver with small buffers (say 256 samples  (~6ms) or less.


In any case, if you are not recording audio or using any outboard gear other than your monitoring system, the quality of the soundcard will not affect the quality of rendered audio files. That all happens inside the box as Slarta said.


The only other consideration I can think of might be MIDI support, but any controller you are likely to add will undoubtedly have a USB-MIDI interface, so that's a non-issue as well.

What creates the sound for each midi track in Sonar? Is it the software font(s) or is it the ADCs on the sound card? What I am most interested in is the sound quality that gets burned onto the CD.

OK You can burn a perfect i.e. undistorted not noisy CD from your Sonar MIDI controlled software synthesizers without having a sound card (audio interface) in or attached to your computer at all. Everything in Sonar is digital. Wave files are digital. CD's are just copies of digital files in format your CD player can feed to its digital to audio converters. You only need to leave the digital domain in order to actually hear it. MIDI is just a stream of control codes that tells a synthesizer what notes to play. With a softsynth the "sound" (digital audio data) is calculated by the software program that is the softsynth and placed into the software program that is Sonar as digital data. That data is represented to you as an audio track in Sonar. That process does not require any audio interface at all, it is just computer programs passing digital data back and forth. So long as it is "in the box" it is mathematically correct (perfect sound) and does not need any kind of analogue device at all.

You have to have a synthesizer to calculate the digital audio. MIDI is not sound and can never be turned into sound, any more than a piece of sheet music is sound. In Sonar if you are using softsynths, you set up the softsynth to receive control from a Sonar MIDI track and deliver the results of the calculations controlled by that MIDI control data to an audio track.

When you mix audio tracks in Sonar or apply effects, more calculations are done on the digital data and eventually you can export the result of all those calculations as a wave file, a CD compatible file, or output to the audio interface. Typically you will have only two stereo outputs resulting from all those calculations which are still digital data (interleaved into one continuous data stream/file in most cases). There is no audio on a CD or in your computer. There is only digital data. Making a CD is just copying digital data from your hard drive to the CD media one way or another and does not involve the audio interface any more than copying a Word file to a CD involves a printer. In order to hear the audio that digital data represents, it has to be converted to an electrical current by a digital to audio converter that creates an electrical signal actuating a loudspeaker.  That is when it enters the analogue world.

Soundfonts are a type of audio sample ie a short piece of digital audio data in a format that a certain type of synthesizer (sampler, rompler, sample player) can patch together with other bits of digital data to make more digital audio data. Some sound cards have built in synthesizers that can use soundfonts, but some softsynths can use them as well, and will happily make digital music without any sound card at all. There are dozens of formats for samples besides soundfonts.