Audiotrak Prodigy Cube or Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD on a Linux machine

[miclis]

Hi

I think about buying myself an external audio card. Cards I'm considering are: Audiotrak Prodigy Cube and Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD (NOT the 5.1 version). The reason why I didn't just buy it is that I'm not sure whether it will work with my laptop running under Linux Mint 18.1 64bit. I just don't want to waste money on something I wouldn't be able to use.
I did a quick research on the Internet and found that Linux had some problems with Sound Blaster X-Fi around 2010-2011, but many years has passed since then and maybe all drivers issues were solved. When it comes to Audiotrak device, it doesn't support Linux officially, but I've heard that it generally works with Linux (though I also found comments, that it has problems with Linux).
So as you see, I still can't be 100% sure that these cards are compatible with Linux. Are there any people who have or had any of these audio cards and can confirm that they are or aren't compatible? Or maybe there are other audio cards that for sure work with Linux (and have a similar price).

Ah, and I'm going to use an audio card for listening only, I'm not going to do any recording etc.

[miclis]

I decided to buy Creative sound blaster X-Fi HD and it works out of the box. I just leave this info here as somebody might have a similar problem in the future.

[Hoser Rob]

Good that it works ... some external sound cards do have Linux support problems. Sometimes the basic stuff works but not the enhancements.

What I'll do with Mint for something like that is search (if you're using Mint 18) "ubuntu 16.04 <sound card make/model>". You can't argue with that user base.

I use a Behringer UCA202 USB sound card and then just use media players that will support just streaming the output via ALSA straight to that USB port with no conversions. That's extremely important because then there's no resampling. You can resample 88.2K to 44.1K audio (or 96K to 48K or 192 to 48) because you're dividing it by 2 or a multiple of 2. But something resampling 44.1K audio to 48K ... which Linux, like WIndows or OS X, does by default ... ruins the audio quality.

Bypassing this via app output modules is a lot easier than using the ASIO/Wasapi driver in WIndows. I haven't bothered trying to make the USB DAC the system wide default because a: all the info I've found is really out of date and b: I do my serious music listening from files anyway.

The media players I use are Clementine and Audacious for music and SMplayer and VLC for video, though I actually rarely use VLC. All support direct ALSA audio streaming to a USB DAC.

[miclis]

So how can I check whether my computer does 44.1k to 48k resampling? I use Rhythmbox as my main music player and I have not seen such an option there.