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Recording high quality audio on your desktop or workstation is great, but often times it isn’t exactly convenient. At a gig, recording a live performance for instance. Sure a minidisk would be fine, but what if you wanted to put out a decent quality, live CD – you’d need some multi-track capabilities (at least two tracks, for the left and right channels). Another scenario: what if you use your DAW (digital audio workstation) for its software synths, real time FX processing and other creative gems? You can’t exactly take your entire PC or MAC to the show with all your precious data on it now can you.

This is where laptop DAWs come in. But to turn a regular laptop into a digital audio workstation, you need an audio and/or MIDI and/or SMTPE generator, etc… interface. There is a much smaller selection of audio / MIDI cards to choose from in the PCMCIA market than there is in the PCI / USB markets. The Ego Sys Wami Box is one such choice which is an audio / MIDI card and more. Packed into its modest breakout box is a MIDI synth, a sampler (with 16MB of RAM to play with), as well as 20-bit audio recording. Quite the complete audio punch. But is it up to snuff? Let’s find out.

Specs

Quite the feature-set indeed – especially for a portable solution.

Since the analog I/O is RCA based, you’ll most likely need the aid of an external mixer for recording guitar or vocals (I highly recommend the Mackie 1202-VLZ – the scope of which is beyond this review, but feel free to email me about it). There is also the option of the 1/4” MIC input, but I tend to find the quality of line-in amps to be less than perfect (see my testing conclusions below).

Of course there are also the digital I/O to play around with, namely the S/PDIF and optical interfaces, which can also be used if you have the right equipment. On top of recording high quality audio, these are also useful for recording high quality music from fairly modern stereos that have digital outputs.

These days 24-bit solutions are everywhere and the 16-bit / 20-bit are aging; given that this is a laptop card, 20-bit is definitely acceptable. The same can be said about 96KHz vs. 48KHz.

But this card is more than just audio. The MIDI I/O opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Using a simple MIDI controller (or even a full out synth, which are usually much higher quality anyway), along with the onboard sampler, your laptop becomes anything you want it to be. A synth, a drum set, a noise maker… literally anything.

Unfortunately there are only drivers for Windows 9x and none for NT / 2000 / XP which may be a limiting factor for some people. There are also no drivers for Gigasampler which is a huge set back if you are an avid user of this excellent program. On the up side, there are ASIO drivers which are a necessity for low latency playback / recording.