Great info already posted. Listening to these guys, I recently bought a PreSonus Audiobox USB audio interface. It is awesome (and I'm sure the FocusRite is, as well). PreSonus has it specially priced at $120 right now. It comes with StudioOne Artist, which is a pretty decent DAW to get your feet wet. I'm still planning to switch to Sonar in the near future, simply because I like the Cakewalk Midi engine. The one benefit of the USB audio interface, which I hadn't planned on, is using it in a live setting. I'm able to send the signal from the laptop through the interface and out to the mixer. Much better than going through the mini phone jack on the laptop.

As far as the laptop goes, I tend to like Intel processors. I'm running an i5 with 8GB RAM and Windows 8.1. I've had no issues with Windows 8, but I recently found a utility called pokki. It gives you a kind of start menu where you can pin shortcuts to applications and files. Makes the whole Windows 8 experience much better.


Rich

Windows 10, 64 bit | BIAB 2019 PlusPak | Studio One 2 Artist