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The only other options are Finale and the new not-really-the-same-since-Avid-bought-them Sibaleus

Notion is actually pretty great, and a good deal cheaper than Finale or Sibelius.

What PCIe cards are you plugging in again?

http://www.uaudio.com/uad-plug...

http://www.uaudio.com/interfac... (with optional thunderbolt interface).

http://www.presonus.com/produc...

http://createdigitalmusic.com/...

USB and Firewire both hook to real audio interface units well enough, although, if you want to go high end, you might still want to use a PCI interface card.

bah... latency of 3ms and great for djing. http://presonus.com/products/Detail.aspx?ProductId=4

I have scored several films ,produced and engineered quite a few albums and cut several radio and podcast spots using Presonus Firepods http://www.presonus.com/. It has just about all the IO you could ask for in an 8 (10 if you count spdif) channel box. You can also daisy chain 3 of them for a 24 channel stack. Also, it is rack mountable so you can readily take it on the road. Overall things just work and I, and my customers, have been very pleased with the sound quality. Not to mention, you get balanced and unbalanced capabilities. To keep things quiet I don't run anything unbalanced if there is more that 3 feet of cable.

If the firepod is a bit much they also offer cut down versions. The firebox, which is a 2 channel unit, and the inspire which has 4 channels.

Digidesign http://www.digidesign.com/, Echo http://www.echoaudio.com/ and Mackie http://www.mackie.com/ also have some really nice gear but can be a bit pricy. I do agree with staying away from m-audio. Their MIDI stuff is phenominal but the audio gear is lacking. I would say the same for lower level Alesis and anything from Behringer.

I also must echo earlier posts in saying that you shouldn't skimp on mics. Your end product is only as good as your source. I would recommend a good condenser from AudioTechnica or MXL for price/quality.

Also, your monitors (for you non-audio folks these are the speakers, not the video display) are also critical to getting a mix that translates well to other systems. You will find that if you use standard stereo speakers or, God forbid, computer speakers what you put out will sound extremely different from stereo to stereo as you listen in different environments.

I personally use Event TR8Ns with a KRK Rockit 10 subwoofer but these babies ain't cheap at $1000.00US per pair. I would recommend looking into KRK http://www.krksys.com/. I did some post work on the latest Stereofuge album with Mark Slaughter producing and we did the entire mix on them and it sounded fat-tastic. In any case, you will want a good near-field monitor that is self powered to eliminate transients.

Finally, clean up your power. You'll be amazed at the difference a $60.00US power conditioner can make to the quality of the sound you get. I use Furman http://www.furmansound.com/ conditioners. This is a good tip for anyone who has a home-theater or high-end gaming system as well.

A good set of reference books for audio newbs is a series of books by Bobby Owsinski. Starting with the recording engineers handbook (available at amazon) they will give you enough info to be extremely dangerous.

I didn't mean to be so verbose but I hope some of this is useful.

It's hard to make a recommendation without knowing at a granular level what you want to do. How many inputs? How many outputs? Is latency an issue? What about frequency/bitrate? Digital inputs? Analog? MADI? Lightpipe? Some light reading... On the ULTRA high end, you would go with Apogee- http://www.apogeedigital.com/ - these are some of the industry's best da/ad converters; and with something like a big ben+rosetta on firewire, you'd be in good hands. Another contender could be rme http://www.rme-audio.com/ Then there's motu's line of products - http://www.motu.com/ - I've personally owned several of their interfaces and can tell you right out of the gate they're great. Good bang for the buck... Then you've got m-audio http://www.m-audio.com/ edirol http://www.edirol.com/ presonus http://www.presonus.com/

get the firepod http://www.presonus.com/firepod.html and be done with it. if you need midi then go for a motu.

firewire or bust

The Firepod by Presonus is a very good piece of gear.

Combined with Apple's Garageband, which can record 8 tracks simultaneously, you'd have a simple, clean and good recording setup with low latency.

J

• http://www.presonus.com/firebox.html
• http://www.presonus.com/firepod.html

• http://www.presonus.com/firebox.html
• http://www.presonus.com/firepod.html

you didn't specify how much you wanted to spend, but I highly recomend the presonus firepod 8 channels of xlr (or 1/4 inch) and it will sound much better than behringer or some ultra cheap POS. resonably priced at $600 street. a comparitively price motu unit (the ultralite) has 10 ins but only two are xlr you could of course spend a lot more...

Plug this... Presonus Firestation

Into your PC running this... Cubase SX

Hey super, you now have the same recording capability as many studios claiming to run ProTools HD (which your million dollar studio is most likely running.) And before you holler about recording quality, lemme tell you that it's 90% engineer, 10% equipment, and I'm being generous to the equipment.

The cost? Under a grand if you don't buy at Guitar Center. ;) I think I paid around $500 for the Firestation and $340 for Cubase SX.. both new and in the box. And you don't even need pre's for your mic.. the Firestation has nice tube preamps on channels 1 & 2.

The best part? You don't need a mac. Sorry mac users, it's true. Thanks to firewire the PC has caught up. And before someone starts shouting Digi001 or Digi002 and the omnipresent ProTools or the venerable Logic Audio... the only real difference between the production suites anymore is interface and editing tools (and *not* sound quality, no matter what you're told.)

Just my opinion. :)

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mcp.kaaos