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

[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.