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

[damann]

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 ?

hi snuupy,
most would agree that you should use an external drive for recording audio. let the app have the internal drive to itself, it's gonna be more stable.
especially on the basis that your internal hd is pretty slow, 5400rpm on an ibook?
get a 7200rpm firewire drive for the audio. ice warrior from box clever is really good but there are plenty to choose from, and they're cheap as chips.
teiwaz' suggestion of stopping recording between songs is extremely sensible. will actually save work as well as provide more stability...