Now I have cmedia 9738 onboard sound on my Asus P4S8X motherboard. Though the quality isn't that great, I was fine with this on windows. Now, I've installed Linux (suse9.0) and I like it, but it dose not like my built in soundcard. So I am thinking of upgrading.

I mainly use my soundcard for listening to music, and when watching videos, movies. I am very picky about sound quality, so I want something that sounds good, though I don't want to spend as much as a Pro card.

I also have become interested in Midi composing, making music, and mixing music as a hobby. My current drivers, from the cmedia website, are very limited and don't even support MIDI. I have looked at reviews for both the Audigy2 zs and m-audio's Revolution 7.1 , but they are of course being reviewed on windows. So i'm wondering what everyone suggests. I am leaning towards getting 2.1 speakers right now, since I mainly listen to music, but 5.1 surround sound is not out of the question.

Are there any Linux specific reviews for soundcards? Should I be worried that sound quality may be not as good on Linux? Can anyone play 2 audio files at the same time in 2 different instances of a player? What Features work and don't work on these new soundcards on linux?

My Soundblaster Audigy I works great in both SuSE and Redhat. Sound quality is as good as it ever was in Windows and all my speakers work. Not sure about simultanious playing of music as I have never thought to try but I will now that you mentioned it.