Sound card question (newbie)

I am just getting started with audacity and am first looking into proper equipment. First of all, my computer still has the stock sound card (high definition audio device) which I know isn’t good. My question is if when I buy a mic preamp, do I now have a newer sound card for the audio to be processed with or do I need to buy both a preamp and a new sound card?

You can use a UCA-202 between the mixer or preamp and the computer.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/peaveyUCA202Lenovo.jpg

It does very well and it’s usually far better than built-in sound cards.

This is under re-write, so ignore the typos and bad sentences.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/windowsRecording.html

Koz

I mean for example If I only have a condenser mic and the m audio duo preamp. Are those two things enough?

Or in other words does the sound card inside the m audio preamp bypass the pc internal sound card?

Wait I think I just discovered the m audio duo has just a stand alone adc/dac converter so that isn’t what I need.

Depends on what kind of preamp you buy.

If it’s a preamp with USB (or firewire) connection then the soundcard is bypassed.

If you buy a preamp that has only analog output, then you’ll need to connect it to the line-in of the computer’s soundcard.

If you haven’t bought the preamp yet, I’d recommend buying one with usb interface, such as the ART USB Dual Pre. You’ll find quite a lot of reviews of many devices on this topic: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/sound-card-reviews/8375/1

If you already have a preamp, that doesn’t have a digital connection, then you could consider buying a device such as the UCA-202. Again have a look at the above mentioned topic for reviews.

Thanks. I have Windows 7 64-bit. I’m not seeing support for this OS from the art dual pre. Do you know which usb preamps work well with Windows 7 64-bit?

I don’t use Windows, so I can’t answer that question sorry.