What's the best way to add more USB interfaces?

dsw67

dsw67

Logician
Hi,

Beginner user here. I currently have a Macbook Pro with 2 USB interfaces. It seems I constantly need 3; one for my Apogee Gio, 1 to my midi keyboard, and 1 to an external hard drive. What's the best way to add a 3rd USB interface. Is there some 'splitter' I could buy?

Thanks for the help.

Dana
 
It's called a USB hub, and I would suggest a Belken USB 2 powered hub. the problem you are going to have though is every audio interface I know of that is USB required the device to be hooked up directly to the computer (no hub's allowed) to work properly.

I would recommend you look into a multi input Firewire interface, it will offer you better performance, higher sample rates (if that matters), and more inputs.
 
Am I making any sense in assuming that the USB audio interface could be directly hooked to one of the port on the MB and the USB Hub hooked to the other port and provide connectivity for the rest of the peripherals?

I haven't bought an external drive just yet, but I'm already short of USB ports on my MBP, since I use a USB Audio interface and a USB midi controller. Whenever I want to go into more refined editing, I prefer to use a mouse, so this usually means unplugging the midi keyboard. The minute I'll get the external HD, I'll be out of workarounds.

Now, hooking the external HD through a hub seems likely to affect performance (maybe quite a bit), right?

Asking because if that's the case, I'm likely to have to start looking for a FW interface sooner than I expected.
 
If you have 2 USB ports, use 1 for the audio and add a hub to the second one, and then use for USB midi. I would suggest a USB audio and a FW hard drive actually, but a good FW interface would be the Apogee Duet is stereo and sounds awesome, or for more I would suggest the RME interfaces, they have the best drivers in my opinion, and I love the sound and reliability.
 
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