Digital Audio Interface

[Jeffery Duke <duke.jeff@gmail.com>]

Greetings all!  I'm hoping someone might be able to help me in this technical question.

I presently have a MOTU 896HD firewire interface which I use for podcasting.  It works great because I can record off of the ASIO while I set the output to the main mix, in order to send to Skype and record it at the same time.

This allows me to talk to people on Skype conference, play music for them, and record it all at the same time.  (Podcasting)

The trouble I'm having is the MOTU unit is dying I believe as it periodically freaks out with lots of static across all of the output channels as well as the odd input channel.  I've attempted multiple different ways to rewire including unplugging everything and setting it aside, to no avail.

So I decided to pick up a new unit, a M-Audio Fast Track Ultra, which would be great, except in the Windows driver assignment, I don't have the option to pick which channel/mix to assign, it's just, "Output" or "Input".  The MOTU has all of the channels broken out along with the Mix for playback.

Given this information, does anyone have a suggestion for a good unit with at least 4 inputs/outputs?  The M-Audio does everything except allow me to play sound from the computer back through to Skype.  I suspect I could potentially bring in another computer, but I'm afraid of the cost, and the introduction of spurious noise that might bring.

Let me know if you need further information from me!

-Jeff Duke Jr.