I'm not really that worried about super sound quality, I just want to be able to separate the input from the output - at the moment everything that is on my speakers ends up on the currently recording track, ie I can even record the windows bell sound on a live track!! This only seems to be a...

Can someone explain 'monitoring' to me in the context of a Creativer XFi card? I'm trying to record audio from the line in jack (which seems to double as a Mic input too..) into an application such as audacity or Ableton, on a machine running Vista. With Audacity (which I presume uses the...