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

[urbanmatador]

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.

most important thing besides rpm's on an external firewire drive is the chipset. firewire drives are just ide drives with a firewire interface snapped on the back, and the oxford 911 chipset is the only one which has been pretty much universally approved as being up to the task.

w.r.t. disk space: at 44.1khz, 16 bit audio costs 5mb per channel per minute. so eight channels, 50 minutes weighs in at around 2gb. the 828 can do 48khz, 24 bit recording, so figure around 15mb per channel per minute, and your total is around 6gb. so your estimate of 14gb is a little high, unless i'm forgetting something which is likely.

but even so, my advice is get a drive that's around twice as big as you think you'll need. there will always come the time that the band plays longer or does a double encore, or maybe just a time when you don't get a chance to do a mixdown... it won't cost too much more, and you won't regret it. drives are cheap. if you go above 40 gig or so, though, look for something faster than 7200rpm.

cheers,
sk