Soundcard Recommendation

[Jim Ramsay]

I'm thinking of doing some home recording with my FreeBSD system,
but the onboard CMI soundcard seems to do a poor a/d conversion -
it's pretty noisy.  Not that I'm surprised - I'm sure it's mainly
because it's part of the motherboard / cheap.

What I'd like are people's recommendations for sound cards.  Here
are my requirements:

- Reasonably good quality analog -> digital conversion is
  essential.
- PCI interface (USB is available too, but I don't understand USB
  as well, and don't know how USB compares for soundcards).
- Full Duplex, unless the existing soundcard would be good enough
  for simultaneous playback (it plays my MP3s fine).
- MIDI optional, but probably a useful feature (I don't know
  where MIDI support is in FreeBSD, though).
- Preferably affordable, of course.
- Well supported in FreeBSD 4.7, though I would not be opposed to
  upgrading to 5.0 if it was worth it. 

Thank you for your suggestions!

If you've got recommendations for software too, fire away.  I'll
probably try audacity and ecasound at least.  Maybe "SLab"
(http://www.slabexchange.org/index.cgi?INDEX) if I can get it
working (I used to use than on my Linux box and found it pretty
useful / easy).

-- 
Jim Ramsay
i.am at jimramsay.com                         PGP Key ID: 0xBE28F488