The best type of connections which was ever made is the MIDI-Strandard. Unfortunality the PC-Hardware was not made for music and so the PC doesn't have any special interrupt for MIDI-Signals.
If you're using a sound card with a game port then your OS has to interpret the PCI's interrupt as a MIDI's once. Also if you're using an USB plug the OS has to interpret the interrupt from USB as a MIDI's interrupt. This leads to the infamous problem of latency as long as Windows is your OS.

If you want to use the USB port:
1. Make sure that you're using the right USB drivers for your hardware

If you want to use the game port:
1. Don't use a normal sound card instead of an audio card
2. Make sure that this audio card uses the ASIOdirect standard
3. Make also sure that your MIDI program uses the ASIOdirect standard too
4. Make sure that your mainboard doesn't use the VIA's chip set (better use the Intel's chip set)

The audio card is the better solution if you want to use a harddisc recording system AND your MIDI system at the same time. For this I recommend the Steinberg's program called Cubase.

I'm not sure wether you're able to shoot your trouble with these informations or not. Let me know how it works!


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Greetings from Frankfurt (Germany),
Sheriff ;-)