Connecting a small midi keyboard to throw some notes at my laptop while I am at the cafe or at home for the holidays. Basically, I just want to be as portable as possible. I just wasnt sure if the soundquality of the bulit-in card in the MBPro sucked or not. If I need to record mics or guitars or other hardware, I most probably would use that. To tell you the truth, I have a G5 desktop studio at home with an upgraded soundcard, breakout box, reference monitors, etc. To turn this good recording into a great one, you can use Logic s Expander or Gate to remove low-level noise between phrases, you can use Compressor to add density and to even out the vocal level, and you can add EQ to fine-tune the tonality of the sound. If you're not recording external sources and don't need to feed monitors with balanced 1/4' or XLR, then you don't really need an interface IMO since everything is rendered, as you say, 'in box'. If all has gone well, you should now have a clean recording of what was hopefully a good vocal performance.

your headphones will be the limiting factor, not the sound output). He went on to say, 'Latency will probably be as low or lower than any external interface and the sound quality is perfect for the road (i.e. In another forum at a different site, someone mentioned to - 'stick with the built-in sound.'