best recordig method for laptops

thanks. I want to create a smaller homestudio once I get money and some more experience. I recorded my own songs since I was 16 on analog fourtracks. eight track rewox. and now hard dics recorders which I have two of standing. a eight track fostex fd8 and a smaller fostex mr-8 hd . But i never ventured into more heavy and pricy setups . i just need to get certain songs on a demo so i can remember the tunes severel years after. I have two computers standard desktops with one windws xp and a emu1212m soundcard using cubase and sonar and the software from the emu1212m card. the other one has four gigabytes of ram and been running opensolaris when I did not use my recording units or computers for a while. so this is a fast machine which I installed 64studio on and saving some money up for the delta1010 or a similar card. I use the mixers on the hard disc recorders and use the two rack unir effect processors for mixing down on minidisc for time being.. the emu1212m card I got because there is adat and analog and also midi with some good sound quality but I was very dissapointed at the usabilty of it on both windows and linux. I am a analog mixer console type of person but have not the money for the better gear yet. I record using a s.e electronics studio condeser and trough preamps into all units I have if it is acoustic but if it is a matter of getting electric bass or guitar on a track I tend to use the rack units for sound effects and then after that all is recorded then mix using the reverbs and compressors on the minidics. the laptop is great for small things using ardour and just the standard recording input and with the mr-8 i can make transfers from usb to the computer but sadly not realtime. now the main problem is that drums is hard for me to get to capture anywhere because I actually use a real studio on the school for recording drums but they still havent put the computer and hard disc recorder up that they bought for it. so they use a eight track fostex tape recorder trough a analog 64channel mixer right now. for recording drums I would need a laptop solution that can do this if i want ral drums on my recordings. which i prefer. I play mainly experimental things but most of it is blues and acoustic when I am not just monkeying aroud with something experimental. i play acoustic guitar and blues harps and learning to play banjo. so this is mainly acoustic one person recordings i do but drums is one thing i can much better just beat in myself or have someone do it that really can play drum rather than programming drum machines. even hydrogen is actually pretty intuitive I must admit. i am not sure what the cheapest but most effecient soltion would be for these goals.

The best performance for laptops by far, is by using a cardbus or expresscard interface. There are a number of well supported devices, but the price point may be prohibitive. This is why I built my small studio around PCI technology, and inside a (special) normal PC case. Look at the FFADO web site for more info on supported high quality firewire devices. Cheers, Quentin