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Rating: 
Summary: Does its job after some tinkering
Review: I bought this recently after the release of Garage Band for OS X. I'm going to share some information that is negative but I am overall happy with the features of this product, with the OS X support, and would recommend it for purchase. The features that I was looking were analog instrument input and the XLR microphone input, along with the best price I could find. I might get into home recording, but I didn't want to spend a ton of money until I was sure I would stick with it.First off the information in the M-Audio web site lists that the box is able to sample up to 24bit/96kHz. It isn't a big deal to me yet, but I haven't figured out how to change the sample rate. This may be a function of the application but I can't figure out how to change it. The second issue I had was with drivers. When I got the unit I downloaded the latest drivers 1.5.8 off their website that were supposed to be for use with OS X 10.3 (Panther). I was never able to get anything but squealing out of my machine with those drivers -but the 1.5.8 drivers worked fine on my PowerBook. Out of desparation I installed the drivers 1.5.1 off the CD that came with the MobilePre and the squealing went away. While I am happy that I can record on my desktop I wonder why I have to back down on the driver version. The third thing is that there is sometimes some sort of latency issue with the unit. Sometimes as I play and switch settings in Garage Band, there will start to be some lag before what I play comes out of the computer. It makes it pretty impossible to play. Strangely when you open up System Preferences and change the "Latency" setting the lag goes away. It doesn't really matter what you change the latency to, it goes away just with changing. I have not used the unit for USB audio output so I can't comment on that feature. Using the headphones in the MobilePre's monitor port would be useful if you were using the USB audio output, but for recording I find that listening to my unprocessed guitar signal is not all that useful.
Rating:
Summary: Does its job after some tinkering
Review: I bought this recently after the release of Garage Band for OS X. I'm going to share some information that is negative but I am overall happy with the features of this product, with the OS X support, and would recommend it for purchase. The features that I was looking were analog instrument input and the XLR microphone input, along with the best price I could find. I might get into home recording, but I didn't want to spend a ton of money until I was sure I would stick with it. First off the information in the M-Audio web site lists that the box is able to sample up to 24bit/96kHz. It isn't a big deal to me yet, but I haven't figured out how to change the sample rate. This may be a function of the application but I can't figure out how to change it. The second issue I had was with drivers. When I got the unit I downloaded the latest drivers 1.5.8 off their website that were supposed to be for use with OS X 10.3 (Panther). I was never able to get anything but squealing out of my machine with those drivers -but the 1.5.8 drivers worked fine on my PowerBook. Out of desparation I installed the drivers 1.5.1 off the CD that came with the MobilePre and the squealing went away. While I am happy that I can record on my desktop I wonder why I have to back down on the driver version. The third thing is that there is sometimes some sort of latency issue with the unit. Sometimes as I play and switch settings in Garage Band, there will start to be some lag before what I play comes out of the computer. It makes it pretty impossible to play. Strangely when you open up System Preferences and change the "Latency" setting the lag goes away. It doesn't really matter what you change the latency to, it goes away just with changing. I have not used the unit for USB audio output so I can't comment on that feature. Using the headphones in the MobilePre's monitor port would be useful if you were using the USB audio output, but for recording I find that listening to my unprocessed guitar signal is not all that useful.
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