PCI Soundcard w/ Waveblaster port & driver for Win7 64bit - does it exist?

[sdsumike619]

Hi, I'm looking for an older PCI soundcard, the kind that used to have the waveblaster port on it to attach a MIDI sound daughterboard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Wave_Blaster

I found a couple of these Diamond MX300 cards, but I can't verify if it will work in Win7 64bit... Is this a futile effort or does something exist?

[johns0]

Wont work as it's too old and driver support has phased out for windows 7 64.

[sdsumike619]

Yeah, just discovered that.. Darn.. Do you know of any sound cards that will run on Win 7 64 that have real instrument sounds built in for general midi? I'm trying to re-create a setup for someone who is older and doesn't want to mess around with virtual synths and all the latest technology.. They had a roland daughterboard from 1999 and it stopped working..

[johns0]

I have a x-fi fatality in windows 7 64 bit and it uses instruments for midi playback with soundfonts,thats the reason i bought it was for the midi playback.

[sdsumike619]

johns0, I remember reading something about Soundfonts.. Are these good cards? How do the soundfonts work exactly? I'm going to look up the x-fi fatality now to see what I can find on it..

[johns0]

The x-fi run fine,the soundfont supplies the instruments to the sound card wavetable so you can have different sounds with different soundfonts loaded.

[El Heggunte]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundFont

[sdsumike619]

This soundfont thing might be the way to go.. Band in a Box requires a full 128 general midi sound set in order to work with that software so I have to find a full soundfont set as opposed to individual instruments.. Do you know any off the top of your head?

[johns0]

Try google for soundfonts.

[nic2k4]

You can check for Win7 hardware and Software compatibility here

[sdsumike619]

K, thank you for your help, much appreciated

[El Heggunte]

To my old ears, merlin_gmv22.sf2 is the one which "doesn't suck too much"

But YMMV of course.

[NJRoadfan]

The X-Fi is the way to go if you want hardware wavetable. Right now I'm running the Chorium bank (about 29MB) which has both GM and GS sound sets. The card also has ASIO drivers if your production work requires low latency output. Sadly the PCIe varients of the card lack actual MIDI ports, the older PCI cards had them on the device bay.

[johns0]

Make sure you buy the x-fi fatality or similar,some x-fi don't come with soundfont midi support.