it didn't suit my purposes for two reasons:
i too don't have a line-in on my laptop, so i bought it to provide me with two line-in's (so i could "record off the board"). the line in's on the mobilepre have an adjustable gain (it's the same gain as the pre's)....and they have no led monitoring on the unit (whaddya expect for $100?), so it was difficult to know what level of signal i had going into the unit. more often than not, i found the signal going into the laptop to be over-saturated due to the gain at the source. once i found the sweetspot i got it to do a great job, but move it just a tad and you've gotta find it again.
i did NOT have this problem with the mic preamps, as that only required one stage of gain, know what i mean? as a preamp, it worked fantastically, and the pre's were pretty quiet and clean sounding. i've got a pretty good recording of a thunderstorm i did with it from my covered front porch and a pair of mxl603's.
so admittedly, this complaint is due to user-error and obvious thick-headedness on my part, but none the less it made me wish for a unit with led-based input monitoring. you just don't get that on a unit this budget-conscious.
the second was that i have a bleeding-edge laptop with
the intel centrino processor and usb 2.0, and after i applied the MS 03-026 security patch (for RPC), i started having bluescreen issues with the mobilepre driver as the root cause. i upgraded the driver, uninstalled (and nuked the keys in the registry), and reinstalled, all to no avail, and m-audio's techs weren't of much help (all that "have you tried the latest driver?" nonsense).
it was rock-solid prior to that OS patch, so something in the patch fscked something up. i'm basically tired of tangling with it, and i know the unit's rock-solid as i had more than a months' worth of good use out of it....so i figured i'd turn the mobilepre loose to someone who could have a better use for it than taking up space on my shelf.
i've got a docking station for my laptop (with a PCI slot), and being as i don't do much field work and don't really need a usb-based solution, i'm gonna go with a PCI-based card (either a delta 1010 or a motu 2408, haven't decided) and get 8 tracks instead of 2.
i think this would be a great interface for someone who's looking to do basic stereo recording, or 2 tracks at a time recording to their laptop and is looking to keep costs down. i had no complaints about it working as a mic pre/interface and thought it did a more-than fine job in that capacity.
wade
