Audio/Midi interfaces for home studio

firepod. . . you can track 10 instruments at a time, has 8 built in preamps, retails for 500$'s street, has midi capabilities, also and most important (and often overlooked) is it has 8 balanced line out signals. Very nice if you ever intend to do any work with surround sound. It's working well with FCP 6 on my rig.
 
yeah I'm seriously considering that. to be honest though i'm not sure if I want to spend $100 more for the additional I/O, in exchange of portability.

I've never used an interface like this. What do you use all those outputs for?
 
One obvious use for 6 of the outputs is for 5.1 monitoring. Another use is for hardware inserts. I have a hardware TC reverb in my rack I use to give vocalists some reverb while monitoring and still be able use my Fireface in zero latency mode.
 
I agree that a well written driver is better as a rule. I was specifically talking about if you are going to use Apple software. Non core audio devices can have some compatibility issues with Apple software. It's not a given but Apple likes to tweek things and their tweeks can cause a lot of grief with third party drivers. The same thing happens in Windows. It depends on your app whether it makes any difference. Digi gets a lot of performance out of there boxes but the core audio driver is very sucky, so they are a bad choice if your going to use them for FCP, STP, Garage band etc. That is probably true for M-Audio also since now that Digi owns them and Avid owns Digi, they will also be on the outs with Apple.
 
I have a Sound Devices MixPre which is meant as a field mixer, but if I hook it directly (analogically) to the line input of my MacBook Pro and let the Mac take care of the digitizing, how will my quality be? How much would I gain by getting an audio interface which hooks to the mac by Firewire or USB? thanks
 
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