MIDI Features
The Live! is a very popular sound card for musicians particularly because of the SoundFont capabilities which are still sought after ever since the Sound Blaster AWE cards were introduced. The Audigy retains the features of the Live! and here's a quick take.
The wavetable synthesize of the Audigy is exactly like the Live!, with nary an improvement. Its still the same old 64-voices available over 2 MIDI Ins (32 channels), four effects, and the requisite GM and GS sound banks. Nevertheless, sufficient for most sequencing needs and definitely enough for those of us who just want to play the occasional MIDI file.
The 32 MB SoundFont limit is removed, so now you can load huge SoundFont banks simultaneously. The synthesizer uses the PCI bus and system memory to allow SoundFont to be cached and trigged by MIDI files direct from memory. The upper limit of the SoundFont cache size will increase as you add more memory to your motherboard. Vienna is of course bundled with the Audigy to allow creation of SoundFont banks and use the sound card as an affordable sampler. The SoundFont app isn't improved very much as you can see, but it still works fine.
Finally, an ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output) driver is included for low latency audio performance when dealing with digital audio in software that supports ASIO. Latency can be set from 50ms down to as low as 2ms. Nevertheless, the performance of the drivers are good and a narrow 5 ms or so delay won't drastically affect most digital audio work.
The drivers supports multi-tracking of 6 outputs with effects and 10 inputs for recording. Audio recording is fixed at 48 kHz but fortunately a utility similar to the one E-MU provided with their EMU10K1 APS card is provided to do a high-quality 48 to 44.1 kHz conversion. You can also route digital audio tracks to the effects processor on the Audigy and route audio outputs to the 5.1 analog speaker outs.
The Live! has one MIDI inputs and one MIDI output, so both the MIDI connections from the Joystick/MIDI port and the Live!Drive are carrying the same signals. The Audigy improves this by providing two sets of MIDI inputs and outputs, so the ones on the joystick/MIDI port and the Audigy Drive are separate. So you can have two controllers on the MIDI inputs, and two external MIDI equipment connected to the MIDI outputs. Much better!
Notice there are two individual MIDI outputs labeled "SB Audigy MIDI Port", the second one marked with a "II"
The slew of applications like Cubasis VST, WaveLab, FruityLoops and ReCycle in the Platinum eX make it a great value.
Some little improvements here and there and usable for most general music composition and sequencing tasks. Nevertheless, Creative should hear the collective call of musicians who are using the Sound Blaster for composing to introduce the APS features with the Audigy as well.
If you'd like an in depth look at the capabilities of the music features of the Audigy, I'd recommend you visit Lars's Live!center site, particular page 9 (MIDI features) and 10 (music applications) of the review. Excellent read.
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