Since some weeks I am proud owner of a Presonus Firepod (a firewire-soundcard with 8 analog in-/outputs).

This week some more parts arrived and I did finish(?) my new rack for mobile recording (the link has step-by-step pictures from building the rack).

It contains:

4HE 19" Rack

Well you need a rack to build a rack :-)

2HE drawer

For the laptop and all the small things that you need.

Headphone amplifier

The SM Pro Audio HP-6 seems to be very nice: 4 stereo inputs can be routed to 6 headphone outputs (each output can select its input).

Presonus Firepod

The heart of the rack: Audio IO at its finest.

I am using the firepod from linux. I was rather baffled in that I didn't need to do anything special to get it to run. My systems where already (a bit) optimised for audio work, the only thing was to build the freebob-driver and rebuild jack and, voila!, I was set to go!

Note: I also tried the firepod on windows but that result was catastrophic! Latency was something around 500ms (I checked from input to output) and I couldn't convince GigaStudio to output on the firepod, it used my internal soundcard instead... I only wanted to try if midi works on windows since it doesn't with linux. But as I don't need midi on the firepod I won't investigate into that any further...