Firewire Audio Interfaces For Os X, Which one to buy ? Options

[snuupy]

Hello everybody,

I just bought one of the new 800MHz iBooks (my first Mac) and I´m planning to buy a FIREWIRE Audio Interface that operates under OS X.

Is there anybody who could recommend a specific product and/or help me with my decision ?

This is what I want to get accomplished with my new "toy":

As a jazz-piano player I´d like to record rehearsals and demos with small ensembles and burn them on CD - I think that 8 audio input channels should be enough for this task. (?)
E.g. bass 1, piano 2, voc 1, sax 1, drums 3 channels.

I don´t expect true professional quality - I simply want to get things done/check things out on my own instead of depending on booking a studio all the time.

My budget allows for approximately 900$ / 900 EUROs.

Until now I took a look at the

- MOTU 828 and the
- M-Audio Delta 1010

MOTU828s two XLR jacks look pretty good to me, because I like to do things with as few technical stuff as possible... Looks to me like you could even just plug in two mics without any adaptors to record a piano/voice duo. Am I seriously mislead about that ???

OK - pretty long post

I´m looking forward to your experiences/suggestions.

snuupy

[snuupy]

Wow - many, many thanx for the great support you guys (and girls ?) gave me !

damann, about your suggestions:

1) Harddisk size for 50minutes/8track recording:

- I read about the Bruce Hornsby Project on apple.com where his technical guy explained that he recorded the whole show of 2 1/2 hours with 48 tracks - the result was ca. 210GB of audio data per night. So little snuupy did the math in his head and came up with 210GB divided by 15 (48/8tracks=6, 2,5hours/1 (hour)=2.5 ---- 210/2.5/6=14GB) equals 14 GB of HD space. Hmmm. Sounds (at least to me) that it would work on my 30GB internal HD. Or did you want to tell me that the iBook´s internal drive isn´t fast/stable enough to write those 8 large files ?

2) Input situation:

I have a MACKIE 14channel mixer complete with LEXICON reverb in a rack. I guess it would do the job.


To all the other guys: thanks again for helping to make up my mind about the 828 purchase.


See and read you soon
With best regards

snuupy