One thing I miss about my old desktop PCs: I had always made sure that I had two soundcards.
The best Combo I had was a Soundblaster Audigy 2 and a Soundblaster PCI 512.
The Audigy 2 is where most everything ran as the primary soundcard, even the PCI 512 was connected to it's Line-In.
What did the PCI 512 do?
MIDI, and Winamp was always set to use that card for it's output. Made it so that I could listen to music through Winamp and it wouldn't be affected by the EAX being used in a game.
Before that combination, the PCI 512 was the primary and a (sadly dead now T,,T) AWE 64 Gold. Same setup, but with AWEAMP: a Winamp Output plugin that used the AWE MIDI chip for the output, loading sample data from streamed music formats through the chip, allowing reverberations and chorus effects.
I miss those combos, but I am more than sure getting a custom motherboard with PCI Express, PCI Classic and ISA would be worth a new car.