Midi sound card

[bencze]

Hi,

I want to record stuff from my digital piano so I'm thinking to get a sound card. Also not particularly happy with onboard sound (basically I think the mic part could be better), so this is part of the reason too.
Now I really don't want to spend on this, just browsing for something cheap. Not sure how much hardware support like EAX or whatever else is inside a sound card, matters. Just something that is a bit better than my realtek onboard ac97 (or whatever it is) and has midi support (either game port or with front side panel). I know I can use a midi to usb cable too but not sure if I want to go with one of those, rather a "real" midi port to a sound card...
Anyway, o what I seen I could go with an Audigy 2 ZS, there's tons of Audigy sound cards but browsing ebay, some of these have some front side panel that has midi connectors (among other things) and generally look nice (and it is being said, the 2 ZS is a good soun card). I also read a bit upon the Audigy 4 series but for some reason there were some mixed opinions there.
Also read about the X-fi but again mixed opinions, some say it's good some say it's not, supposedly they have some real crap (considering) models out there, too, with all kind of different chips so it is hard to see the difference which is good or which is not... :/
Anything else I can consider, similar to cheap solutions like these (these are like $30 to $80 or so on ebay or so, apparently)? Or really not many companies made decent sound cards in the past years? :) hat would you recommend?

Any tips or pointers would help, really.
Thanks!

[Weeman]

steer clear of MIDI, technology has far surpassed MIDIs usefullness. Take a look at Creative EMU product if your set on buying a sound car. For just a beginner I'd suggest heading to your local music store and picking up a PC adaptor for your synth (around 50 bucks), will plug in via USB (which is 'two way'... computer control the synth, and vise versa). Just bring the model number with you, the guys can google it there as to which exact one you'll need. You can also find a trial version from their website for Sonar Producer Edition x64 bit, it should have Beatbox embedded into it. That's all you need. Really cool stuff with Sonar, can record all the tracks seperately (ie guitar, bass, drums ect). Beatbox is awesome if you want to get into dance/trance/electro mixing. Don't sweat the Sound card too much, they are mainly for multichannel output. You're spending a lot of money for 9.1 sound processing where recorded music is mainly 2 channel. Not to mention if you using any digital coax/fiber optic outputs, the entire sound card is completely useless.

*Removed torrent reference, not allowed here - IMOG*

[bencze]

Thanks for the input, although I'm not looking that much for sound technical solutions, just to record through midi.
I want to record from my digital piano, not using midi keyboard or synth so I don't really need to mix stuff or whatnot. All I want is record midi and be able to replay it, but there's quite a lot of software for that where I can chose the piano sample I want etc.
Hopefully in a couple of years I'll upgrade to an acoustic upright or something, but till then I will want to record this way, should be much better quality than through a cheap mic and it helps my learning process. :)
It's also for general purpose really, not just to record, tired of my onboard sound (mic usually doesn't work too well, volume a bit low for ventrilo / teamspeak, if I enable mic boost it gets a bit noisy / creepy sounding).

I have a midi to usb cable but not very happy with it, maybe it's just me not using proper software tools. But since I want to get a soundcard anyway for general purpose too, I just though I'd rather go for something that has proper midi input, and this way I won't really be risking much. Afaik a soundcard can serve me for long years to come since they deprecate much slower.

I checked a cheap e-mu card, 0404 or what was its name, but afaik it doesn't have mic in. Might sound good and able to record but I'm not spending on it just to remain with the other half of my problem :)

I checked some of the better Audigy cards on ebay and will be keeping an eye out for them, while I read up a bit more. I'm fairly positive I don't need a "pro" soundcard, but I do have a SB Live somewhere I don't use atm, and that's not what I want either (driver problems, last time I spent a day setting up kxproject driver and it doesn't even have midi port, so I won't even try to find where it is :) )

PS: It's quite interesting, it's as if there's no other supposedly decent, cheap, well known soundcard but these Creative ones. If there are, they're certainly hiding pretty well. :)