Cheap: http://www.presonus.com/products/AudioBox-1818VSLThis one will give you 6 line in on the XLR/TRS combo jacks. The other two combo jacks are XLR/Instrument, so you woulld have to add an external AD/DA converter like the presonus Digimax FS to get you 8 additional line ins.

http://www.rme-audio.de/en\_products\_fireface\_ufx.phpMuy expensive, but gets you 12 analog line ins with no extra hardware necessary. Jason A. just picked one up.With most of the other 8 channel interfaces, you will need to connect an external AD/DA converter via ADAT Lightpipe, spdif, or AES to get more than 8 analog line ins.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an audio interface which would use USB 3.0? I'm finding anything Firewire is getting harder and harder to accommodate if I go the PC route. Something similar to the Echo Audiofire 12 would be ideal for me. I need at least 8 inputs 12 ideally for doing enough tracks live.

I started a separate thread about buying a laptop for my entry into digital recording but got a lot of my info from this thread as well so wanted to re-post here too...So thanks to all for the help. I made my purchase...For the laptop I went with the Lenovo T530It has an expresscard slot which I'm going to outfit with the SIIG FW 800 Card Bus. Got a good deal on the SIIG card for only $39 bucks!For the audio interface I'm going with an Echo AudioFire 12I hope this all works out... Oh and for software I'm going to use Reaper.I plan on using an Allen and Heath Mixwizard 16 channel or something similar for basic mic pres to start and then build out from there. Any suggestions on the best route to have 12 mic pres to use with the Echo Audio Fire? I was thinking of starting with a basic mixer and then get more into selecting pres later on...tube pres and what have you...So in summary good starting point or did I totally screw this up?Thanks as always for you wonderful support EA members!

Piccoman2 wrote:Hey Chris,Want to buy mine? PM me and we can work out details. If I upgrade my setup which is likely then I won't need it anymore. It works fine.Damn, just got a used one off Ebay before I saw this!

Piccoman2 wrote:So in summary good starting point or did I totally screw this up?Looks great. Reaper's very efficient, so I doubt you'll have many hiccups with that setup. I regularly record 12 tracks with the same AudioFire converter into an old XP box at 24/96 and don't run into problems (although I do have to run some latency on playback for mixing, but that's not a big deal).One thing that you probably figured out that took me a while is that the Echo has a mixer on board for monitoring before the A/D converters. If everyone wants their own headphone mix when you're tracking live, you could pretty easily pull them all out as stereo pairs from there. Giving everyone their own little mixer is classier, but you can invest in that down the road.

Piccoman2 wrote:I have a 1 TB drive that I purchased about 2 years ago. Its a Western Digital "My Passport" drive. Do you think this would work to start?That should work fine, I expect. The most important thing I've found is that they be at least 7200 RPM discs, so if it's a 5400 you may want to get another.In another post I had some other 1 and 2 TB drive recommendations which I'm going to look into. One quick question...do you record directly to the drive while tracking or go local first and then move it over after? Wasn't sure if going directly to the external drive would cause a speed issue.Record directly to the external drive. Recording to the same drive that is running the OS and DAW will cause stuttering and artifacts.

BusBus wrote:Nice! It seems like you should be in good shape. Definitely get an external drive or two for recording/backups.I'm really surprised that you found a new laptop with an express34 slot.Yes me too. I found the Lenovo by using Google over and over again and found another message board where it was being discussed. What is kind of ironic is that my company (day job) issues Lenovo ThinkPad's....I've had a T410s for my work but I wanted to dedicate a laptop for audio use. They load the work PC's up with an image which basically gives the machine's processor a frontal lobotomy...plus they lock out the admin rights so figured it would be best to just get my own. I can say that Lenono's pretty bulletproof. I've had my work PC for 3 years and traveled all over the damn place with it and its been rock solid.BusBus wrote:Nice! It seems like you should be in good shape. Definitely get an external drive or two for recording/backups. I'm really surprised that you found a new laptop with an express34 slot.I have a 1 TB drive that I purchased about 2 years ago. Its a Western Digital "My Passport" drive. Do you think this would work to start?In another post I had some other 1 and 2 TB drive recommendations which I'm going to look into. One quick question...do you record directly to the drive while tracking or go local first and then move it over after? Wasn't sure if going directly to the external drive would cause a speed issue.Thanks again!

oh man I'm so pissed off that I went with an HP instead of the ThinkPad on my last laptop acquisition... should probably sell it

Took a little bit of messing around but I got that M-Audio Fast Track and Audacity working on my laptop yesterday. It's a little wonky as I'm using the direct instrument/line input on the Fast Track, which is recognized as the right channel in Audacity. Even changing the track in Audacity to mono and then the right channel wouldn't work, but I can split the track to mono and it seems fine.Les Paul->Thermionic TE-01->Rusty Box->Fast Track actually sounded pretty good for demoing guitar stuff!