Advice About The Mbox, would anybody recommend this Options

[gollumis]

i am a new commer to digital recording, i have a strong mac with plenty of power. i was thinking about purchasing the mbox, is anybody familiar with this device? i am looking for quality vocal recording at a low price. can anybody throw down some 2 cents......

thanks

[abcdaniel]

I bought the mBox and moved to ProTools after much angst about which system to choose. I also make hiphop, and the things that made me choose mBox/ProTools was:
*good sound quality on two channels (rarely would need any more for recording vocals and the odd instrument + monitoring)
*nice micpreamps built-in
*no powercord needed
AND
*ProTools has got an excellent way of handling tempo for audio (not as great for midi, though). I mostly make music by cutting and pasting audio until i find something nice. The thing with ProTools is that i can set the tempo afterwards and get my chaotic cutting and pasting to fit perfectly within a 4/4 loop, making it easy to arrange, and I can do it all within the same window as I am cutting and pasting in. It so much less fuzz and more creative than Cubase VST which I made the transition from. In general ProTools is very simple and very powerful, features much appreciated after struggling with other maze-like applications.

The downside is that ProTools is eating CPU, really. There are other threads here on macmusic which treats amounts of channels/effects possible. It is not an issue with very powerful macs, I think. Do a search in the forums. The other downside is the retarded support for other applications and stuttering OSX support. I believe that the mBox is usable with most apps these days, either via the extraretarded CoreAudio-driver or via JackTools