Chosing My First Midi Device, newbie hoping not to regret a purchase Options

[chewdog]

I just bought a Power Book G4 1ghz wih the purpose in mind of setting up a mobile recording studioo that I could bring with me when I go to jam at friends houses. I also want to use it to record songs I have writteb ect. I have garage band loaded up and it seems easy to use. Now the problem.
I need to buy a midi interface so i can plug guitars, drum mics vocals ect into my mac and be able to record my music. Can some one recomend a good less than $400 multi input USB/firewire midi device with line out ? not sure which work and which are more headaches than than they are worth. I don't want to buy something and then find out if doesn't do everything I want it to. Any advice or help is appreciated.

[rickenbacker]

You might like to check out the new Edirol FA-101, announced at NAMM (music trade show) recently. Should be available to buy very soon and I'd venture to suggest that Edirol products are more reliable driver-wise than M-Audio's. I think it has Midi on board, too.

Otherwise, I don't know that USB is actually responsible for latency. The advantage of FireWire is simply that it's much faster, so you can cram more audio down its data path than you can with USB, so you won't get audio glitches and dropouts as your Mac and the interface dump data when the stream gets too choked, ie when there's too much happening in the song at once.

That said, there are many happy users of USB interfaces round these parts. If you want to record 32 tracks of audio, you might need FireWire to handle it all simultaneously. If you think 16 tracks and under should do you for starters, get a USB device (they're much cheaper) and see how you go. Tascam do some popular ones: US-428, 224 or 122. You can always upgrade to a FireWire interface if you find you need more tracks.

Or if you can afford it, yeah, go straight to FireWire. Prices are dropping all the time.