Making music - soundcard

do you have an outboard mixer you'll be using? and how many mics will you have on the drums? if you need to run say, 5,6,8 mics into the computer at once, you'll need a card/breakout box with that many mic ins, perhaps an aardvark Q10

there are lots with multiple line in's: digi001, aardvark lx6 (4 ins),others (have a look on the musician sites like musician's friend)

i wouldn't think that creative card would be much use for multitracking

how much do you want to spend ;)

It certainly wouldn't. The Creative is an okay card but can only do one input at a time. All of ron's suggestions will do the job nicely. I can't stress the value of decent mics though.

My best money saving tips are hiring a church for a few hours (I mean a proper old stone and gargoyles one) as you'll get a decent natural reverb for free that you can increase / decrease with mic positioning and it'll probably only cost you a few quid, and if you don't want to fork out for some expensive room mics, get some Pressure Zone mics. You can get them in electronics catalogues, they're cheap and they are perfectly fine for capturing the ambient sound of a kit.

just a word of caution about m-audio/midiman: when i was researching cards, i came across lots of criticism of service, drivers, etc. and the elegant piece of programmingpieces of shit that are the oxygen8 drivers are worrisome also

so...if you look at any of the deltas, do plenty of research first.

To contradict that, I love my two Midiman Delta 1010s and M-Audio/Midiman have been wonderful in regards to customer service, they still update the drivers after I don't know how many years the thing has been out.

Anyway, yeh, how much do you want to spend? Is this recording a one off thing, or do you want a studio? What kind of quality do you want? What software are you using? What OS? What outboard gear have you got?

If you plan on doing more stuff with computers and audio in the future please stay away from Creative products, they are evil in the wrong hands!

For just recording a drumkit with two mics (you can actually get damn good results doing this in the right room and microphone placement) Id poodle on over to:

http://forum.cubase.net/cgi-bin/cubase.net/Ultimate.cgi

one operating system note. stay the hell away from OSX. it's going to be great, once they fucking finish it, but it terms of stability and speed it's lightyears away from being usable with any audio gear. Pro Tools, Logic, etc, it doesn't matter what it is, they all crawl like dying bugs on OSX, when they're not crashing.