The Guitarport is the only device of its kind thats makde for the sole purpose of plugging your guitar into your PC in that way.
That being said ..
What 90% of us do is just buy an interface and plug our instruments into a DI Box and then run the DI Box to the interface. Guys like me have an interface that accepts an instrument level signal and we just plug directly into that for recording DI's.
This is very interesting. So, basically, what you're saying is you'd need a decent DI box, like the Radial, and run that through an interface like the Safire, yes?
That's interesting about the GuitarPort. I wasn't aware that it was sort of unique in that way. I would just get another Line 6 device, but, for some reason, I always get these very weird electronic sounds out of Line 6 devices, so I didn't want to be spending any more dough on them. I had been using an AudioBox until recently, but it started having some problems, so I wanted to replace it.
Now given what you've told me, would it just make more sense to get a new AudioBox, or go w/ the Safire assuming it does the same thing as the AudioBox, only w/ better quality?
Right now I'm using this chain to record w/
Guitar>GuitarPort>desktop>Reaper w/ sims+IRs