Recommended USB Audio/Midi Interfaces for Ardour?

I have the smaller edition of your #5, the Behringer U-Phoria UMC202HD. The only difference is that it does not have MIDI ports, only audio. So far I did not have any issues with it.

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Rubix 24 works perfectly. It’s well built and very silent. I can recommend it.

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Yep, I figured as much - I may not have conveyed very well that I was definitely pickin’ up what you were layin’ down, if you know what I mean. We have already experienced a little bit of the difference between preamps, but maybe our experience has been only with professional studio level stuff (hence the concern over the microphones themselves), so I wasn’t aware that these consumer-level made much of a difference. The noise floor or signal:noise hasn’t historically been much trouble for us, but it’s definitely on my radar now. For our mixes, most of her material is loud/rock but this latest bunch of material has been mostly just vocal/piano so I can imagine I might get annoyed. On the other hand, noise reduction in processing/post-processing seems pretty good these days, so, I dunno. This ongoing conversation has really highlighted the point that we need to decide if we are going to go in this direction (home-recording) permanently and if I want to make the kind of investment needed to get the sound we want. I was sorta hoping I could pick up enough fairly inexpensive gear to help me make that decision. The problem, of course, is if I pick up a bunch of garbage gear, the decision will end up being obvious, meanwhile giving an unfair bias against the home-solution. Ugh. I’m just overcomplicating it for myself, of course.

@Mickeyb Good to hear the Behringer gear is holding down the noise. I think most of the complaints about their gear that I’ve read is it’s just not built very physically robustly, but I doubt we are likely to abuse our hardware in that way these days.

@samthursfield Yeah, I noodled about on Long & McQuade’s catalogue, and there are a few similar mixer/interfaces out there. As far as routing goes, we are unlikely to use more than 3 tracks simultaneously that often, so I don’t feel like the sends will present much trouble. This is definitely an option for us.

@varaki we haven’t used MIDI much so far, but I know she would really like to have the option to try that going forward. Mostly we’ve just been recording the audio signal.

@lilith33 While I’ve seen the odd Rubix device, I haven’t put them on any of my short lists yet. I’ll add it so I can do some more comparisons.

Based on everyone’s input so far, I can tell there are a lot of options out there that cover a plethora of different use cases. I think I am leaning toward the Komplete Audio 6 now, but it’s only a lean so far, LOL. I can definitely see us opting for one of the mixer/interface combo units.

To add to the decision making

I recently bought an Audient iD4 and find it brilliant !
Excellent pre-amps electronics (coming from Audient’s analog professional mixers), low noise, direct-monitoring, two headphone ports (nice when working with another musician which seems to be your case), solid metalic contruction and quite inexpensive !

iD4 is 2 in/out, there’s obviously bigger options (iD8, 16, etc)

Cheers,

I got Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 mk2 yesterday. The short version of the story: the device works fully in Linux. Full report here:

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