External Sound Blaster Sound Card Question

This question is directed at member Chris (cjaflesquire@aol.com).

Chris your email doesn't work no more
I hope you or anybody here can help me.
My name's Eddie and I live in Bristol, Uk, where I teach and make a living playing music.

After a lot of Googling and forum posting I found a thread here concerning Chris's SB external card and wondered if you could offer me some advice?

I've been using a very modest set-up including SB Live/AKG-C1000S for the past few years. It works really well and I'm very happy with the results. Any upgrade would take me into silly money, so here I stay for now.
I did recently buy a SB Live External S/Card (SBO490) with a USB port. Spec looks very similar to my old internal SB live 5.1.

My query is regarding triggering the soundfonts in the external card.

The internal SB has the joystick /midi port to connect a keyboard to it but in the external one there is no such port. How do I get my keyboard to trigger the soundfonts in the external card? Would it involve buying a midi to USB lead and connecting the keyboard to the pc? Would the keyboard midi info automatically route to the external card?

I hope you can help me as it's starting to drive me crazy.

Thanks in advance.

Ed.

I had an external soundblaster before I upgraded, and you can use midi in via USB to the computer and it'll work just fine. All the routing is handled in cakewalk. Hope this helps.

Joe

Crafty: Sorry about my E-mail. I changed Internet service providers and my new E-mail address is cjandersonesq@bellsouth.net. It was Robomusic here on this Forum who enlightened me about Soundblaster Live and soundfonts. I now use a $50 Soundblaster Live! external soundcard with my laptop and get excellent results. Robomusic did me a huge favor by referring me to Sonic Implants. There I purchased for around $15 U.S. their "pianos and keys" soundfonts. About 12 classic electric piano sounds including the very best Fender Rhodes I've ever heard at any price! If you E-mail me (I don't see your e-mail address) I can perhaps answer some of your questions and you can answer some of mine. I have learned that soundfonts are loaded into your computer's memory. Most of the soundfonts being sold or shared today are HUGE files and require changing some settings on your computer to set aside enough memory to hold them. That sounds like trouble to me so I don't use anything but comparatively small soundfont files like Sonic Implants' Pianos and Keys which don't require such monkeying with one's computer settings. Do you know where I can get a deep, rich, "resonant" acoustic piano soundfont?