Playing and Marching Simultaneously
I'm a new user to HS (bought HS2 in July and upgraded to SHS4). I play the keyboard in our church. For my first daughter's wedding, we just hired an outside organist but my second daughter who's getting married in October asked me if there was any way I could play the wedding march for her myself and still walk her down the aisle, so I decided I'd get HS to enable me to record a MIDI sequence. In addition, my other daughter is the maid of honor and she's a singer, so we're hoping that in addition we can do a vocal selection with an audio track and a midi track combined. I would just bring in my laptop with HS on it, plug it in to the instrument at church, and have someone else operate it at the proper time.
As I'm sure happens to almost every new user, I quickly discovered the meaning of "latency" as I began working. While my initial efforts went well -- just recording a MIDI sequence and playing it back using the built-in voices of the instrument. However, trying to record an additional audio track for a vocal while playing back the previously recorded MIDI sequence really brings out the limitations of the HP laptop (256MB memory, AMD 1.3 GHz Athlon Processor) with a built in Conexant AMC audio card that I've been using. Similarly, there's a huge delay when I try to use the EDIROL synthesized sounds and try to play them live -- the time lag between the keystroke and the beginning of the sound is just too long and it throws me off.
So, I'm convinced that I'm going to have to get another machine and sound card to be able to do the things I need to do for the upcoming wedding and, beyond that, the things I'd like to do for fun in the future -- this stuff tends to hook you pretty quickly!
First question: What I'd like to do is build a special machine just for using with music that will be kept in the same location as my home instrument. Everything I've read indicates that the most important factor in reducing latency is a good sound card. I'll of course put in a decent speed processor, motherboard, and at least 512MB of memory. I'm looking at the M-Audio Audiophile 192 sound card and the E-Mu 1212M sound card. Does anyone have experience with either of those and would you think they'd be sufficient to do what I need?
Second question: Is it possible that I could get around building a new machine by just getting a PCMCIA card for the laptop? My instinct tells me that I'd be better off with a dedicated full size machine, but it would obviously be a lot less trouble to just slip in a card on the laptop if it would actually work.
Thanks in advance for any help.