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#1
Serious synth recording on Win7 with a modern computer
I used to be able to easily record from a MIDI keyboard on an old desktop computer with a good PCI soundcard that had a MIDI input socket for the external keyboard. For the software I used an old version of Logic Audio, .sf2 soundfonts and Logic's EXS24 synth files for the sounds, and Windows XP operating system. I was able to mix multiple tracks of synths (recorded in MIDI format) and regular audio, and got very nice results.
How can I get something like that working on Windows 7 on a modern computer? Recording plain audio seems easy enough with a decent USB mic, and something like Audacity or even an old copy of Audition runs fine for me. But MIDI keyboard recording presents a problem because there's no MIDI input socket, and no PCI slot for my old soundcard. I can easily buy a USB keyboard, and Logic will run quite well in the XP Virtual Machine, but it won't recognise the MIDI input from USB.
So does anybody know of a (preferably freeware) program that would "hear" a USB keyboard and generate, record and play synth sounds? Naturally it'd need to be low-latency (don't want a noticeable time delay between hitting the keys and hearing the sound), and it'd be very desirable for it to have .sf2 soundfont support and to be able to record and play audio as well, in a multi-track editor. Audacity and a few other programs do a good enough job with audio, but none of them seem to really support MIDI. I expect a lot of MIDI keyboards would be bundled with some kind of a studio-type program, but whether or not they'd be suitable for serious music recording is hard to know before buying and trying.