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Any removeable HDDs should go on USB, and NOT the firewire.Ĥ) When you're ready to record. m-audio, motu, and several others make great boxes.ģ) Don't put ANYTHING ELSE on that bus. just any PCMCIA firewire card will work.Ģ) Go Firewire for your breakout box. Get a Firwire card Which one? If you're on a PC. You want to squeeze every bit of bandwidth out of your chosen interface as possible, so here are some suggestions:ġ) On most MBs, (even the Mac Pro Desktop - some versions, not all they keep changing their MoBos), the firewire port and the USB ports are running off the same bus. All your peripherals (mac and PC) are on your USB ports (even your mouse and keyboard). Good points, but really in laymen's terms. If you're really going to load up your machine with audio bells and whistles, though, or you're looking for a 12- or 16-track IO setup for real multi-track recording, you'll really benefit from the Firewire.
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Thus if you are using a lot of VST filters and effects for processing your audio as you record, or using software synthesizers to do instrument tracks along with the audio you're taking in through the interface, the total CPU load will start pushing the limits of the machine sooner with USB.įor just a single channel or a stereo pair, recording to the hard disk without a lot of signal processing you probably won't see any difference, and the USB interfaces are a bit cheaper and there are more to choose from. The primary difference is that the Firewire interface on your computer has hardware to handle the process of assembling the stream of bits from the external device into a collection of bytes in memory and to handle the overhead of the communications protocol, while the USB requires the computer's processor to do that. Firewire is spec'd at 400MB/Sec, and USB 2.0 at 480MB/Sec.
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Actually, the two are very closely matched on throughput if you're comparing USB 2.0 and if you're looking strictly at max bit rate.
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