best sound card for windows vista for recording?

It does depend very much on your personal needs and budget. The reasons it would be a good idea to use an external soundcard and not an internal one are that an internal one may be more likely to pick up interference inside your pc's case and at from the small microphone plug and probably even more important is that with an external device you may be less likely to experience Vista driver related issues... On the other hand, having an external solution might create new problems depending on exactly what you're doing. If you're going to be doing a lot of editing or any sequencing a PCI solution will probably be a better solution. There are also mixed options available and those might be the best solution, it all depends on your specific needs.

Yamaha is a very good choice for recording but there are many other professional soundcards available, the more exotic the more likely they'll be to have issues with Vista though, unless they don't need drivers/are completely external.

If you want to go for an internal consumer card, Creative's cards are very good for the money and Asus has also just released a new card that's getting good reviews...

here's some links;

http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?categ... (recommended for serious consumers)

http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=25&l2=144

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.famil... (recommended for serious semi-pro's to pro's on a budget!)

http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=100&nav... (if you're very rich)

http://productsen.terratec.net/

http://www.turtlebeach.com/

I hope this helps, if you have more info we could probably give a better answer, let us know! Good luck!

It depends on your needs and budget. I would avoid PCI sound cards and go with USB based devices. Yamaha makes one for under $100 that I've seen recommended to converting tapes or vinyl to digital format. Of course, you could spend a lot more...