Sound Cards for Windows 7

Here's what I think. Any current soundcard from a decent manufacturer should be OK. If you want usb, make sure it is usb2. Beyond that, the packaging and connectors are the important things. Beware of the cheap units in plastic cases, as they can pick up hum from power cables or RF from wifi. I've been looking at Win7 with a few usb interfaces on a couple of machines (to check 32-bit and 64-bit OS's). What is interesting is how the different machines and soundcards behave differently. I've got everything working fine, but, for example, I have a Tascam US-122L and US-144, both of which use the same drivers, but which behave differently from each other and require different settings on the two machines. For Windows 7, which has far too many weirdnesses in its internal audio options, I like my old Edirol UA-3FX best because of the physical sample rate switch. You will, of course, have to be using a software recording application that uses asio to get decent latency.

I, too often record guitar nowadays. There are several things to think about. ASIO refers to a sound driver technology that bypasses the inbuilt Windows drivers and gives inherently lower latency. I'm afraid I know nothing about Cakewalk V6, but many recording programs can natively use an asio driver stage. If that program does, then you should be using a soundcard that also supports asio drivers. Soundblaster asio drivers are notoriously erratic. But, for example, E-MU soundcard drivers from the more professional arm of the same Creative company are good. If you need to look at other recording applications, a good, up to date, low cost one that uses asio is "Reaper" Realtek soundcards don't have asio drivers. Here, I have an analogue mixer hooked up to a desktop machine, but rarely use that to record guitar. For guitar, I would normally use a specialised recording interface - a good example would be a Cakewalk (Edirol) UA-4FX that has mic and guitar inputs, direct monitoring (which means no latency at all) of inputs and playback of the previously recorded audio. You can usually use a mixer to provide direct monitoring in a similar way if it has reasonable monitoring and signal routing options. Hope this is some help.