sound blaster choices

[Ralph]

Given the choice of three soundcards (listed below), which would be best for
listening and recording to CDs MIDI files, with the following
considerations: ease of general use (I'm a composer first and computer
person very last), would downloading sounfonts be possible (either over the
net or via CD rom), and is the GM sounds of the sound cards about the same
in quality? Any other comments you care to write would be appreciated.

The soundcards are all made by Sound Blaster and include Sound Blaster Live,
Sound Blaster MP3, and Sound Blaster Audigy 2. I am using a PC clone with
XP, only have 112 megs of RAM (I'll need to add some RAM).

Ralph

[Harry]

Ralph;

The Soundblaster MP3 will NOT handle any midi or soundfonts. The
Audigy 2 is the best choice. I use a notebook version on my laptop,
and a PCI version on a fast desktop machine with lots of ram.

The Soundblaster Live will work on older machines with short ram (112
MB may be too short) you want at least 512 or 1 GB. I run a
Soundblaster Live on a 2.0 GHZ machine with 2 GB of ram. I also use
Cakewalk Pro 9.0 with that setup, it works great. To add soundfonts to
your Sound Banks you will need the Vienna Software that comes with the
sound cards.
The Sound Banks can then be easily loaded using the Creative software.

I started with a Sound Bank that came with my AWE 64 card and edited
sounds in to it by removing native sounds to conserve space. Don't let
your Sound Banks get too big by overloading the instrument sounds and
using up all of your ram. My sound bank uses less than 12 MB. I have a
pedal steel and various fiddles and guitars loaded.

Good Luck;

Harry