I am musician and a friend of mine bought a new cubase 8.5 and he lent an old cubase vesion 5 to try and I love it. I am thinking in build a home studio, so, I want to buy an interface to use my old syntetizer as external MIDI controller to play VSTs intruments and hear a good sound. So, I dont know about which of these ones to get ( I use a PC) . Somebody can help me?
Important points:
Dont matter the number of inputs, I will use only a neumamn microfone.
I want LOW latency to control VSTs intruments
I want good sound quality to hear what I am producing in the computer ( monitoring)
So, which one these ones? And the good points and bad points of each one.
All 3 are very solid audio interfaces that will do what you need.
None of them would be a bad choice. I think the most important thing is to look at the future and see what other needs you may have by then. Pick the one with the features that will fit your future scenario best.
What might also be a factor is how long companies support their products with driver updates for new OS’s. I have no experience with either 3 brands in that regard, but it might be worth researching.
Roland supports their products for a long time. I have an ancient UA-5 (a usb 2 channel sound card) that I bought over two decades ago. I can download 64 bit drivers from Roland’s webpage today and still use it. They kept updating drivers all of the way to Win7. That is phenomenal support.
Steinberg, although I love their software, does not have the same reputation as Roland for hardware support.
I would advise you to check on the respective company’s websites for information about their drivers. I used a Roland UM3-EX MIDI interface but Roland have not provided a Windows 10 driver for this so it no longer works with my laptop or desktop machine.
I’ve been very happy with my Steinberg UR interfaces.
I just recently upgraded to Windows 10 (64bit) and lost use of my Roland UM-3ex MIDI interface as others have reported. Roland had not and has no intention of updated their driver for this device to Win10. Fortunately, there is an easy hack for this. You can download and install the Windows Vista 64 driver for this device and (at least for me) it works perfectly.
In order to get it to load you may need to disable Windows Driver Signature Enforcement. This can be done by rebooting the PC while holding the shift key. Once you get the blue screen you need to navigate to “Troubleshooting” and disable the signature enforcement on the reboot.