No midi- just tons of audio options:
XLR, rca, 24 bit A/D D/A converters.
Works in wave, sound manager and asio driver envirnments, and lists WIN95/98, NT4.0, Mac Os8x on the box.

Maybe it's not what you want, but Fran loves his. I missed the request for midi in the opening post - sorry.

Eq, there are already 7200RPM 2.5" drives out there and they're bound to become the standard anyway (saw one from Hitachi). Then there's the plethora of external USB2 and Firewire drives that all spin at 7k.

I bought myself a PC-Card USB2 hub (ST Lab $35) for my soundcard and I'll be adding a faster drive sometime soon.

-tek

Ok. The thing is, I have read lots of articles on the Net that say laptops are NOT up to the job (for a whole bunch of reasons).

Lately I've had a sneaky suspicion that these articles I've been reading are out of date and that laptops have moved on a lot in recent times.

So, based on what has been said... can we officially declare that laptops ARE up to the job after all? Can they match their desktop counterparts when it comes to making music?

Infact, for anyone who is interested, here are two articles that talk in depth about how and why laptops are not up to the job...
http://www.audiomidi.com/classroom/cedge/cutting_edge1.cfm

...and....
http://www.audiomidi.com/classroom/cedge/cutting_edge2.cfm

Tell that to Aphex Twin and co. Saying laptops are not up to the job is so 1997.

-tek

Well, that's cool.

That's what I was hoping.

So, as of today (yes, that's right- TODAY!) laptops are officially as good as their desktop counterparts at doing music production.

Yeehaaa.

Yes, but that depends on your budget.

How much are you willing to pay?

How of a professional sound card do you want?

The one I was thinking about costs $1000

Wow! I never even realised that you could get soundcards that were that expensive.

I was actually thinking more in terms of an M-Audio Audiophile (external USB).

They come in at around £180.

I just got an Emagic a62m (6 audio in, 2 out + MIDI in/out) USB soundcard and am considering getting an Apple Powerbook and an external 80GB Maxtor firewire hard drive sometime next year. For audio, you definitely want a faster hard drive (most laptops ship with hard drives that are only 4200 rpm, 5400 is the bare minimum) and I've found that it's actually cheaper to buy an external 7200 rpm hd than to upgrade to a crappy 5400 one.

would that sound card also work with PC computers and would it work for desktops?
Thanks