Looking to expand!

S

stuy101

New member
hey guys, so at the minute my studio is farely small/basic. I'm running pro-tools LE on my dell laptop, with the digi mbox mini usb interface. It's ok for what im doing at the minute(mostly just mixing what me and my mate record in his house) but im looking into expanding into doing more recording. So with the setup i have, i have only two channels to record with and basicaly i want more! So I know I could just upgrade to avid protools and get and better interface with more channels but lets face it there is cheaper options for a home studio.

So to get to the point, I like working on protools so i was wondering as im upgrading to a desktop soon could/should I use a different DAW and interface to record and then transfer the audio tracks back to protools to mix there? and if you have any sugestions to what other DAW's are user friendly and what interfaces work well with them!

cheers, stuy.
 
When you ask for opinions like this, you'll mostly get people telling you whatever particular interface/software they use is great. It's just like reading reviews for monitors. That being said, I'm using a Presonus Firestudio Tube and I like it a lot. The pres sound great, and the biggest feature that sold me on it was that it has 10 preamps, not 8 like most others. 8 is never quite enough. Plus it has 6 line inputs to use with external preamps or instruments, so you can easily get up to 16 mics recorded at the same time. I got mine b-stock for about $500, and am using the Studio One DAW that came with it.

Studio One is ok, not great. The interface came with S1 Artist, and I paid $100 or so to upgrade to Pro. That was a necessary upgrade, mostly because S1 Artist does not let you add additional plugins. Other than a few weird quirks, I've been happy with the software. The most frustrating quirk: it has no track numbers. The only way to get a number on each track is to include it in the name, and then rename tracks as you add new ones or move them around. Not a huge deal, but so strange that they didn't include numbers. There is all kinds of useless info displayed for each track instead.

If you did upgrade your Protools, I believe you could use that with most interfaces from other manufacturers instead of recording and then transferring over. Don't quote me on that though. As far as a desktop goes, you may find you don't need one. I'm running my stuff through a Dell Inspiron 1545 Laptop with a Pentium Dual Core 2.3 GHz processor, 4 GB of ram and Windows 7. I use a firewire card to hook up the Firestudio, and ran a regular keyboard, mouse, and DAW controller through a USB hub. I have had no problems wit latency or anything, and it's not even a dedicated computer. I use it for everything else, then just carry it into the studio and plug it in when I'm ready to record. It's pretty sweet to be able to bring it along with me to do editing and whatnot when I'm not even at home. Plus, I have everything right here when I need to email out files and all that.
 
thanks for the input dude! yea i was looking at the Presonus gear as an option it seems to be the best for the price and the fact that you can get a hold of one for not too much that includes ADAT is pretty cool! :D
 
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