So I work for a non-profit that's got an old archive of about a thousand old cassette tapes of various conversations and interviews. We're digitizing the whole wack of them to give to the women's studies library of a big university.

What I'm looking for are recommendations for an interface. I'm a home recording artist with plenty of experience using Logic Express and plenty of other hw and sw products. But it's a novelty thing: I'm pretty much going to be buying like 8 cassette decks on ebay or craigslist so that the job goes as quickly as possible.

A friend of mine recommended the M-Audio Delta 1010LT. He's used it for close mic'ing drums and has no trouble tracking 7 or 8 channels at once.

_But I also need to recommend a platform. I think the university might buy us a work station to do the conversion on. New dualie G5 towers aren't compatible with the Delta. And since I got my Saffire for home recording (which isn't a good fit from an i/o standpoint) I haven't paid much attention to what kinds of cards are out there.

Budget needs to be sensible.. under $300 would be fine.

One last oddity: there's an old 1.25ghz G4 tower here in the office which is shown no love at all. I'm considering turning this into the cassette-ripping workstation and just popping a huge FW hard drive onto it to store all the aifs. That would let me run Logic Express and avoid any potential IRQ hassles that might make folks raise eyebrows if I don't get true plug-and-play from whatever windows card I end up with.

Many thanks for any suggestions of specific sound cards with 8 or more RCA inputs!!

-boze

The G4 should do the trick (check the RAM, somewhere higher than 512 MB in OS 9… 1 GB in OS X)

I don't know if you want to work in OS X but in case, OS 9 will make the G4 fast.

For this kind of job, any interface can do, it' s more the drive that is the bottleneck, but a second internal Drive (you can have 3 of them beside the system one) or the firewire HD will be ok. I have no personal experience with the Delta so I can't help much there. Given the budget there won't be much choice.

check if you can find a MOTU PCI 324+2408 or 2408 mk2 maybe…