My board does have inserts on all the channels.

See, I stumbled upon 2 MOTU 2408's and the interface card for right around $200, and that was a whole lot more affordable than the $2000 Presonus piece you suggested. And my end goals are not all that complicated.

All I want to do is continue creating music in Real Band and be able to mix it on my Mackie mixer, with my rack mounted effects on the effects bus, EQ if I want it, compression.... those onboard tools just don't work for me. I have yet to be able to use the onboard graphic EQ in Real Band and get anywhere with it because it isn't real time. I don't like "stop the playback, move these sliders with your mouse, hope that it is what you are looking for, and play back, and if it's not right stop the playback and tweak some more." I need to be able to reach out to my 31 band EQ and tweak in real time. The same for reverb.

Until I get this interface card into a computer and see what it looks like I don't know if it will play well with Real Band. That would be the only reason I care about exporting the tracks to Sonar, because I KNOW it plays well with Sonar from being at my friend's studio and using it there. My stuff is so basic that I don't think I have yet approached 16 tracks (maybe 10-11 tracks was my highest).

Rob, you in particular have seen how I struggle with the Real Band onboard stuff. I think for my application external effects are going to work out better for me because I am used to them. I can't EQ to save my soul in Real Band, but that is mainly because it isn't real time. If I can move sliders while I listen, I do a much better job.

My biggest concern here, and the reason for the thread, was whether after generating drums, bass, rhythm guitar, rhythm piano and pedal steel onto 5 tracks in Real Band I can send those 5 tracks out individually to a mixer so I can massage them. According to The Harvmeister I can do that. Obviously I won't have channels for kick, snare, hat, rack, etc..... though I COULD do that by sending MIDI drum events to my drum machine which has an output for each drum, but there is no need to get that deep.