I want to get a half decent sound card for recording my guitar and maybe vocals at a later stage when i get a mic. I have been looking at the M-Audio FastTrack USB which seems pretty good but there isn't a Linux driver. Will it be picked up by hotplug and still work by any chance? If not what card should I get for about the same price? I'm running Slackware 10.0 with the 2.4 kernel.

I'd suggest having a stroll through the supported cards list at the alsa site and cross reference that list with a list of cards you would purchase. There should be something suitable from the two combined. You can find the supported cards here.

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...dor=All#matrix

good luck.

Cheers Peacedog. It likes quite likely that it will be compatible but I've emailed the user mailing list to check as well.

If it is compatible, I'd guess it would use the usb-audio driver. I didn't see it on the alsa supported cards list, but you may have some luck with it.
good luck.

USB audio support is very shotty at best still. I have a audigy 2 NX USB, supposed to be 2.0, only comes up as USB full speed (12mb). I had to down mix audio to even make it audible. Really to me its a pain in the ass. I would rather have got a card that was alot more compatable with linux then have to deal with this. The only time i can take advantage of the 24 bit/192ks is in windows sadly

Is all the USB support dodgy then? That's a pain in the ass because that card seems perfect and windows is the source of all computer evil.

I cant really give a solid answer on that bro. I have no problems with my usb mouse and i hear people having success with different perhipherals. What I would do, since you dont already have the hardware is to do some research, see what hardware has really good linux support. I'm not like alot of linux users and dont see ms as the "source of all evil". High price for a sub-par product it seems at times. whatever. I still boot into xp when I need to take advantage of my hardware for recording or playing my games, if i didnt play games in all honesty i would probably not even need windows. Like I said though, look around and ask questions. I already had the USB audio card and i wasnt about to spend money on another one just so i could use it in linux so i made it work, you have a chance to avoid some hassles.

By any chance has anybody heard of the hammerfall dsp or whatever, what it does? is it midi or a full audio device? It seems to work pretty decent with the usb audio driver from what i hear and it might be good for this guy. If anybody reads this thread try and give suggestions. I get really dissapointed when i see 50 something people read a thread and nobody so much as tries to help the person out.