Which Audio Interface For Cubase Sx, Need one with excellent OS X drivers Options

I just bought Cubase SX for Mac OS X. Haven't even received it yet, so my perceptions aren't colored.

SO my question is: how am I gonna get sound into my Mac? I don't need anything as powerful or expensive as the MOTU 828.

Something like the Edirol UA-5 would be perfect - if it works. I've been reading horror stories about incompatibility with Cubase SX (with the old beta drivers for Edirol). I gather the M-Audio DUO is even worse. And I'd use the mBox but . . . no OSX drivers.

So: recommendations. Should I get a PCI card? Is USB gonna work since I'm starting fresh?

Thanks a million.

Jeff

[Presto]

I appreciate having a usb card as it leaves the Firewire port for my external HD

[rickenbacker]

Hello again, loveme1965!

Re. Edirol devices, I've had much less trouble with them than other people seem to have with M-Audio gear. I had a UA-5 and never had any trouble and now I've got a UA-700 and still haven't had any trouble - the beta driver wasn't perfect, that's true, but with the new "official" version 1.0 drivers (released a week or so ago) I've got no complaints. Using my 700 with SX, Logic 5.5, Reason 2, Live 2 and a few other apps and everything's cool.

What Presto said about leaving the FireWire port free for an external HD is also worth considering. It depends what Mac you've got. I think Presto and I both work on laptops, so we've only got one FireWire port. If you're going to be recording 8+ tracks of live band or you want to send 24 tracks out from SX to an external mixing desk, you'd probably need FireWire to handle that amount of data transfer smoothly.

But if you're recording more or less on your own, doing a track or two at a time, and mixing internally (so that all you're sending out is the stereo 2-track mix) then USB can certainly handle that. You'd still be advised to use an external FireWire hard drive (or extra internal drive if you've got a G4 tower) for storing your songs, though - leave your apps on the Mac's hard drive and store all the song data on another drive.

Hope you enjoy yourself when SX arrives.

Thanks, Rickenbacker, for the feedback.

I've got three separate internal hard drives in my G4 tower, including an 80GB that I'll use strictly for recording.

Glad to hear you have not had much trouble, since I now have the UA-5 and Cubase SX on the way. (I got an academic price on the SX so it was really quite reasonable).

Thanks again!

[Bubbachao]

HI Loveme1965! I've got a quick question for ya, what's the academic deal on Cubase SX? And also for everyone else, if we only have one firewire port, does that mean that daisychaining is out of the question? And are there any PCMCIA-based solutions?

Bubbachao, I paid US$349 for Cubase SX at floridamusicco.com.

Rickenbacker, I'm now messing about with SX and the Edirol UA-5 on OS X. I can get everthing working fine when the UA-5 is set to 48 kHz, but I cannot monitor and record simultaneously when the UA-5 is set to record at 96 kHz. Is there a way around this? Setting the SX to output sound to the onboard sound hardware while recording from the UA-5, for instance? Or am I stuck with 48 kHz?

[rickenbacker]

Loveme1965: you might already have figured this out, but the UA-5 (like a lot of similarly specced interfaces) can't simultaneously play and record at 96khz. I don't know if there's a workaround - I'd guess not. I've not looked into it too closely, as I tend to record everything at 16 or 24-bit, 44.1khz.

The whole 96khz claim is the kind of thing marketing types think looks great to boast on the box, like those ludicrously inflated scanner resolutions you see sometimes. They're not actually lying, but the truth has been stretched a little!

[Presto]

I agree with rickenbacker.

Apparently, if you record at 44.1khz you get sounds up to 22khz - that's half (don't know why). With 96khz you would get sounds up to nearly 50khz and you'd put bats to shame if you could hear that. Assuming I've got very good ears for someone a little older than 6yrs (the best age for ears - supposed to decline after - although an adult chest does "hear" better than a kid), I can probably hear well up to 16khz.

This is an interesting debate but I don't think we need to bother about it. I can record on 48khz but have decided to only use 44.1 This is so I don't lose anything converting to 44.1 when bouncing to CD. However, 24bit digitising is definitely much better than 16bit, unless you don't need to modify anything and are just using your computer as a recorder.

Hope this isn't too off topic

[gigarok]

are there any PCMCIA-based solutions?   

i tried to use a Digigram VX pocket, but I ran into a lot of the snags
that the M audio people are experiencing: frequent CPU spikes, Audio dropouts, crashes.

The driver for it is a beta
so the real release will probably work. (i hope)

I might check into the edirol stuff. Their new controllers look
nice too.