I want to make my own sound card using a PIC

From what I know the PIC ADC is limmited in speed, let's say a PIC16F877, can it process at a sample rate of 44100 Hz ?

If not, I will need an external ADC that will be connect to the PIC16F877, I looked on the web for ADC converters, but I have no idea what are better than others.

For now I'm just concerned to bring the sound into the PIC, I will see about sending the sound to the computer later...

PS, I don't mind that the ADC of the PIC is only 10 bits, I'm doing this for fun, and I don't need precision

 

You can see how well the PIC will do by looking at a program loop that reads in each conversion and stores it in memory. The time it takes to execute that loop is the absolutely maximum rate you can convert sound into a file. Adding switching right/left sources will slow the process. You don't have the horsepower to do any compression, so it's a straight sound file (equivalent to a .wav).

How many megs of memory can you put on the system? .wav files are huge.

 

I wrote a short program that reads from analog, and counts the total number of reads per second, and sends the result through the USART at baud rate 9600.

I got ~6337 ADC reads per second.

So how can I do this faster ?

Better microchip ? or external ADC reader ?

 

At 200ns per instruction and no more that 25 instructions per loop 200KHz is doable. Adding loop counters and accessing the USART will add to the 25 considerably. If you have a scope toggle a GPIO bit every 255 loops and measure the time between triggers. 50 instructions should easy which is 100KHz. Once again this is without any USART functions