I have been hooking up my keyboard and mics to a Mackie mixer along with a virtualizer. I also hooked up the output of the mixer to a Sony minidisc deck to record. The MD output in turns is hooked up to my external sound card (Sound Blaster extigy) via optical. The extigy interfaces my laptop via USB so the quality is very satisfying to me when I'm using WaveLabs 4.0 to record.
If I don't record "live" straight to wave, the extigy will also serve me as a midi interface to talk to Cakewalk Sonar.
For midi playback at home, I also use a wireless PCMCIA PC card to search for midi files on the web

Claude