Anyone happy with their USB interface

[Force666]

I just got a Lenovo R61i laptop, unfortunatly it has the dreaded Ricoh 1394 chipset. So i was wondering if anyone can recommend a USB AI that they are happy with. Toneport?

Thanks guys.


This is just for a portable rig for home, etc. not really for recording other than just playing around with ideas, demo stuff. Although it would be nice if I could do some editing on there when I am home. Is this possible with USB?

 

[2000ContourSVT]

I have the Agere firewire chipset in my Macbook and I too didn't want to deal with the troubles of firewire. So I picked up the USB 2.0 M-Audio Fast Track Ultra and I've had no problems with it at all, even when recording 6 tracks at once. It's also compatible with Pro Tools M-Powered if you're wanting to run PT.

 

[mintcheerios]

I love my E-mu 0404 USB. All the music on my soundclick page was made with it. The one annoying thing with it though (I'm mentioning it before Marcus does ) is that the drivers can only be used for one application at a time. It's hard to reference to mp3s, but I get around this by clicking the release driver when in background setting in Cubase.

I can't live without its 1/8th inch stereo output which lets me buy and use $10 craigslist speakers when I'm traveling to different places (which I do a lot). Also I like to have separate volume knobs for speaker output and headphones output. It's nice to have midi and decent preamps with a generous +65 gain too.

 

[Metaltastic]

Haha, yup, someone had to say it! If you can deal with that infuriating driver issue on the EMU, then it seems like a good bet - however, the Edirol UA-25 (or UA-25EX, AFAIK that just adds a limiter to the preamps) looks even better, and I've heard of people being able to get the latency down to 128 samples on it.

Oh yeah, and the EMU Tracker Pre is identical to the 0404 but without SPDIF (whereas the 0202 apparently has inferior converters)