Simple audio interface

patlang12

patlang12

New member
I am going away to college and I am looking for a simple audio interface to use with my macbook pro. I want to have at least a 1/4 input. XLR would be nice, but not required. I would it mostly to record ideas on guitar. It doesn't need to be high quality, because I am trying to use this just to get the ideas down. I also want to use it as an output to my moniters. I am not looking to spend lots of money so let me know what my options are. Thanks a lot!
 
Ok thanks for the replies. From the research I have done it seems that getting a firewire device is the way to go because I really don't want latency. I just found out that I am going to be in a really small room and I don't think I am going to have room for an amp so I might try to use this setup for jamming. I want to be able to run my guitar into garageband and then through my monitors so latency just won't be acceptable. Will that beri firewire device have any latency? I was looking at the M-Audio FAST TRACK PRO because I found them for pretty cheap on ebay. It has a lot more features, but if it is going to have latency then that probably won’t work for me. What do you all think?
 
If it were me I'd go with the Presonus Firebox. That M-Audio Fast Track Pro looks okay too.

I want to give a big huge *NO* on the Behringer FCA202. I bought one of those to use with my iBook and it simply did not work properly. It might be fine on a PC, as the person who recommended it is using. But there was nothing I could do to get it to work properly with my iBook. I really wanted it to work too, as it is cheap and small.

But I sent it back and am now using a MOTU Traveler with no problems.
 
SonicAlbert said:
If it were me I'd go with the Presonus Firebox. That M-Audio Fast Track Pro looks okay too.

I want to give a big huge *NO* on the Behringer FCA202. I bought one of those to use with my iBook and it simply did not work properly. It might be fine on a PC, as the person who recommended it is using. But there was nothing I could do to get it to work properly with my iBook. I really wanted it to work too, as it is cheap and small.

But I sent it back and am now using a MOTU Traveler with no problems.
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what problems did you have with the fca202? I think the firebox is a little out of the price range right now, but I can pick up a fast track pro for cheap enough. Does anybody have experience with it and know about the latency with it?
 
It was a wierd issue with the FCA202. It would work fine when it was the only thing on the firewire buss. But if I connected an external firewire hard drive either before or after the FCA202 it would not work properly. Same thing if I put the FCA202 and the hard drive on a firewire hub. There were a lot of audio artifacts when an external hard drive was connected to the laptop.

Oddly, the same thing happened when I used a USB hard drive. The FCA202 would simply have a lot of problems with an external HD connected to the laptop. I did a lot of troubleshooting for a few days, using all sorts of different combinations of hard drives, software, hubs, etc., but nothing helped. I ended up sending the Behringer back, which really bummed me out because I liked it's low price and the small footprint.

It actually sounded pretty good too, I had no problems with that at all. It also worked fine if all the sounds came off the internal hard drive and there was no external HD connected.

Using a MOTU Traveler with the same laptop and same external hard drive there have been no problems whatsoever. I couldn't be happier with the Traveler, it's a great piece of gear.
 
Thanks for your reply. So with any of these units will I be able to set it up like this?:

Guitar goes into box-then into laptop- the back out into the monitors

What if I want to just plug in my Ipod through it sometimes too? I know I can just get a y-cable and plug the Ipod in, but if I could do it through the unit it would mean not having to always unplug things from the back of the monitors.
 
The fast track pro is probably the most full-featured device in it's pricerange. I have a us-122 and never had latency problems with usb. The line 6 toneport comes with some amp and preamp modeling software, which might be nice for recording guitar direct. I think for 1 or 2 inputs, there will not be much difference b/w usb and firewire.
 
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