notato8

Hey John, thanks for the video. I ended up purchasing the Motu M2 and I feel confident in my decision. I think having two combo ports is perfect for me as a solo artist/hobbyist, and hopefully it shouldn't hold me back if I start to have higher demands.

That actually makes sense, I don't know how I didn't realize that. I had tried this setup with the interface and there was latency from the MIDI instruments, but I switched to WASAPI Shared driver mode and the latency is no longer noticeable.

Thanks so much everyone, I got more insight than I ever could have hoped for. I actually just found out my brother has a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, so he let me experiment with it to see if it worked for my setup and it was exactly what I needed! The only issue was that it doesn't have MIDI in; I could work around this by monitoring my keyboard's actual audio while still recording MIDI input directly through my laptop, but I would much rather be able to hear whatever midi instrument I'm playing instead. As far as MIDI goes, the best options I was able to find for under $200 were the PreSonus AudioBox USB 96, PreSonus AudioBox iTwo, M-Audio Air 192/6, Behringer UMC204HD, and Motu M4. Are any of these a particularly good/bad choice, and did I miss any other good options? Thanks again! I'm hoping to buy as soon as possible.

Hi, thanks tecknot! Glad to know I was on the right track, I do still have some questions. How can I determine if I'll need a built-in preamp or not? From what I could gather, they are mostly necessary for microphone recording, which I don't plan to do. My keyboard has MIDI in/out ports, but no USB, so I use an adapter cable to connect both MIDI to my laptop's USB. Would this plug into the interface instead, or would I still plug it directly into my laptop? What do you mean by "excellent ASIO drivers?" I wasn't aware of the existence of anything other than ASIO4ALL! (which is what I tried using, and had used successfully on my last computer) I assume that my computers other specs should be good enough considering it is a gaming laptop (Ryzen 7, 16GB of memory, and some SSD). I don't have thunderbolt, but my ports are USB 3.2 Gen 1 at best.

I would like to record piano audio on my laptop (and potentially also use my computer as a guitar amp), but I have been unable to do so without output latency in Cakewalk while input monitoring. I disabled audio effects while attempting to record, which did not fix the issue. I also tried using ASIO, but I couldn't get any audio to output through my speakers, despite successfully doing so on a previous computer. These issues, combined with the fact that I'm using a gaming laptop, have led me to believe that my integrated audio is not powerful enough even for my most basic goal. (of course, I may be completely wrong about this and just doing something wrong). I should also mention this isn't a Cakewalk-specific issue. To my understanding, what I need is a preamp/audio interface/USB sound card (I don't know if these mean different things)? Assuming that's even the right move for me, this brings up a some questions: 1) Can/should I use an audio interface for MIDI, or is using USB fine for that? 2) Would I still have the benefits of using an audio interface while using Bluetooth headphones or my laptop's built-in speakers? 3) With a good enough audio interface, would I be able to monitor guitar input after running it through amp software, without latency? I'd appreciate any insight, I'm pretty lost on this topic and I'm only doing this as a hobbyist so hopefully my problem isn't too complicated!