RE: audio interfaces (was 'MD Help!')
2004-08-15 by Dieter Vandoren
Hi rryman23, First of all, welcome to the world of computer recording. Second, welcome to the world of a thousand choices. 'cause there's a loads of possibilities... Your working on Powerbook/iBook, right? So no PCI internal cards for you. Remains: cards with USB, Firewire and PCMCIA (PC-card) connections (iBook doesn't have all of these). Cheapest is USB, Firewire is newer and more expensive, but provides more bandwidth. PCMCIA is only found on more pro systems like RME's Hammerfall. Judging from your question, you don't have a lot of equipment to record (just an MD?). So a card with a few inputs would be enough, USB works great for that. If you want loads of inputs/outputs (>6) Firewire would be the way to go, but it has it's price, of course. Depending on your needs you may also want a certain number of outputs, that's for you to figure out. Then there's the options: do you want MIDI connections to sync your gear to your software sequencers, for example? Do you need ADAT connectors? Digital s/pdif maybe? Manufacturers to check out: (certainly not all) m-audio rme motu egosys emagic tascam edirol presonus I happen to have an Emagic EMI 6/2m USB interface for sale. It's got 6 inputs and 2 outputs. So you can record 6 mono instruments, or 3 stereo instruments, or a combination of mono and stereo. Plus it's got MIDI I/O for sequencing gear, synching software etc. If you need digital it's got s/pdif I/O too, but then you can't use MIDI. It's one of both. The stereo output is used to send the output from the computer to your amp/monitors/mixer. Link <http://www.emagic.de/products/hw/A62m/index.php?lang=EN> to manufacturer info. Let me know if you (or anyone else) might be interested (private mail). I'm selling it because I need more inputs (RME Hammerfall + Multiface). I hope it's a little clearer now, and not to confusing... Greets, Dieter [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]