What is a decent setup for a laptop?

A

acoustic rain

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I now am limited to a laptop with the only hope of getting any audio from it would be a USB audio interface setup. I have been investigating some lower end units such as the MobilePre USB from M-Audio. I really only want to be able to create some drum tracks in acid pro and when they're complete, record them (from my laptop using the AI) to my DAW (Fostex VF-160); possible, right?. So . . . ultimately, my question is what would you recommend for something like this? Again, it's really the outputs that are important so that I can get a quality track to my recorder without having to use the headphone out of my laptop. Thanks, Kirk
 
any of the product from usual suspects: m-audio, edirol, presonus, yamaha, Tascam, Emu (now creative but giving the Emu brand benefit of doubt based on history), etc. in the $99-$150 range would be fine

the Echo Indigo PCMCIA (cardbus) A/D/A has been discontinued and is available at a steep discount Here's one location

and while I could not locate the url on a cursorary search I've seen the firewire Mackie Onyx Sattalite as low as $130

if the $99-150 is steeper then you can afford there are options (from Behringer for example) in the $30 range and some of the entry level items might be available via craigs list for cheaper then new. I'd have no problem with at least looking at used Tascam, Emu, Edirol, etc.

at the entry level price point there is little to distiguish among the boxes except for robustness of drivers (m audio might be the winner their), robustness of build (edirol or Yamaha though I have a nine year old USB Tascam still going strong) and feature set (Echo Indigo should have tightest integration with your computer (how well it might perform with Vista is completely unknown to me) and matches what you were asking for almost exactly)

good luck
 
Thanks for the response oretez. I checked out the Echo Indigo but my laptop only accepts the express type bus cards. I have a Toshiba Satellite. Plus, the 1/8-inch ins and outs don't speak well for it (IMO). I have looked at the Lexicon Lambda & Alpha, the PreSonus AudioBox USB 2x2. My Fostex VF-160 has an ADAT out, do you know if there are any adat express cards? Maybe that could work, although I've never used adat before and am not even sure what it does. Or any other type of express card (of course I'll get right onto researching this as well) that could be useful? Kirk
 
adat

I have the Fostex 160ex.. great recorder. I'm not really familiar with the use of the ADAT optics either. From what I'm reading is it can give you an additional 8 tracks on the Fostex. Currently you can record 8 Directs, 8 Buss for a total of 16 tracks, but with an ADAT you can bump that up to 24 tracks of recording. I'm interested to see if anyone post on this as I would like to get some additional info as well although it probably doesn't totally have anything to do with your purpose of the original post. I just recently bought the cakewalks audio interface. Its not bad if you are planning to only record single tracks at a time.
 
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