Most cards will record and play back sound in stereo. A few provide four-channel input and output. Most offer a choice of 8- or 16-bit samples and several sampling rates.

Although even the least expensive cards come equipped with a MIDI interface, they may not serve your musical needs. Their onboard synths are likely to be bare-bones FM units, and their channel separation when playing stereo sounds may be minimal. These factors limit their application to games and sound clips that indicate changes in programs and functions.

Some of the more expensive cards have both digital and analog inputs and outputs. This feature is essential if your productions must meet recording studio standards. If the 80 db signal-to-noise ratio of conventional analog recording is adequate, one of the myriad mid-priced cards will work perfectly well.

If you want a sound card that is satisfactory for music and games, be sure it is designated as "game compatible" and that it has two synthesizers.

If you use a sound card for purely musical tasks, avoid the game compatible cards. They compromise the flexibility of their synths and the fidelity of their outputs.

Buying A Sound Card -- A sound card is not very amenable to in-store demonstrations because all of its functions are driven by software. Changes take place so rapidly that you are not apt to find a salesperson who is conversant enough with a particular card's software to answer questions of accessibility.

The best thing to do is to obtain the telephone numbers, postal and e-mail addresses of the manufacturers and user groups pertaining to the cards that interest you. Many of these companies also maintain a page on the World Wide Web and a slot in a forum on computer services such as CompuServe.

In addition, surveys of sound cards frequently appear in such magazines as "Keyboard," "Electronic Musician," and "PC Magazine."

SOFTWARE FEATURES -- Each card comes with a collection of programs including several sound-editing programs, a sequencer, a program that runs its mixer, and programs for replacing the sampled sounds in the card's synthesizer.

Some of the applications run in Windows, some in DOS, and some in both. You may need sighted assistance when customizing your access program to the requirements of the Windows-based programs. However, once the icons have been named and your screen reader has been customized, you can determine which of the wave-editing features can be manipulated from the keyboard rather than with the mouse.

If navigation by mouse is necessary for your applications, try using a "touch mouse." Instead of moving the mouse, you move your finger over a flat surface. Since the device itself remains stationary, the action of clicking on an icon doesn't move the pointer.

Don't be surprised and discouraged by the fact that, with rare exceptions, some of the features of each program will be accessible and some will not.

In addition to the software that comes with the card, there are programs available that can be tailored to multiple cards. I will mention a few which are accessible.

The "Accessories" group in Windows contains a program called "Sound Recorder" which is easy to use without any special setups. With it you can record and play sounds, add echo, raise and lower the pitch by octaves, play the sound backwards, and delete the sound either before or after the point where you press the spacebar and stop the sound. It is a good tool for exploring the capabilities of a sound card.

"Cool-Edit" is a very attractive Windows-based sound-editing program for a blind user. You can define a sound sample that you wish to modify or delete by using the arrow keys and shift-arrow key chords. It provides all the standard processors such as filtering, volume compression/expansion, reverberation and delay.

It includes an "effects" generator that is basically a software version of an analog synth. You can specify "noise," "tone" or "dtmf signals," (dual-tone multiple-frequency), the tones that touchtone telephones use for dialing. Once you select a menu item you specify the "color" of the noise, and in the Tones items, the frequency, and characteristics of modulation, the envelope, filtering and the duration of the sound.

These effects can be combined with other sounds or strung together.

Two additional effects are worthy of special mention. One is the "stretching" item in the Edit menu which changes a sound's pitch without changing its length.

The other is in the Generate menu and is labeled "music." It lets you play a sound from your synth's keyboard. So you, too, can have your dog bark "How much is that doggy in the window."

This program is economically priced and is suitable for projects that can be completed within a two-channel stereo format. Another nice feature is that the program is not "card-specific." In fact you can direct its output to the PC's speaker. As you would expect, the resulting sound is nothing like that from a sound card, but you will have a way of trying out the program while shopping for a sound card.

"SAW" (Software Audio Workshop) is an advanced Windows-based sound editor intended for producing a complete recording session. It can accommodate four stereo sound files at a time. These files can be edited and mixed "nondestructively" before the final results are saved.

Your work can be synchronized with MIDI or SMPTE files. This high-end program will work well with the top-of-the-line sound cards from Turtle Beach, Soundblaster and Audio Spectrum. Many of its features are graphical and thus require sighted assistance. SAW is a good investment for someone who wants to engage in projects typical of a recording studio.

"CSOUND" is a program with which you "build" your synthesizer and the music it plays. It is labor-intensive! All the data for the process can be typed in. It comes in DOS, Windows and Macintosh formats. A fully functional version of CSOUND can be downloaded from the Internet.

Go back to the Table of Contents.