Tried and tested RME fan here but guess even the FF400 is still a little outside of your price range.
Hear good things about MOTU but also heard that their Mac support is much better than their PC support and a few complaints from Windows users. This is going back a while and may not even be a consideration any more.
Also hear the Focusrite Saffire series are meant to be pretty good for mid-priced firewire interfaces…
Had a look at the pricing. The FireFaces are double the price of the others.
The MOTU seems great though and I might get it.
For lowest round trip you want a MOTU or RME, If round trip is not so important (Probably wont be if you mainly use Renoise) then pretty much any interface is pretty good nowadays, If you can afford the MOTU ultralite i would go for that myself 
This doesn’t help too much, but I second that you should stay away from M-Audio. I have an M-Audio Firewire 410 and the drivers are shit. In the past I’ve had them conflict with other drivers and give me random blue screens of death.
Also, it’s really inconvenient because you can’t “hotplug” it. If you unplug it or turn it off you have to restart your computer for it to work again.
Problems like those, plus having to constantly keep up or research what works with what carries weight to the budget and time conscious.
I was considering Class Compliant Audio Interfaces, but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. One of the things I really wanted to do was mix digital instruments and effects with my pedals. The other route was to maybe just get a portable recorder.
I wrote about my soundcard, the Edirol FA-66, in the above linked thread.
I bought it because it needs no drivers.
Works as advertised. I am a fan.
I have the MOTU listed above and absolutely love it. Read the manual!
Thanks, I added it to my list of interfaces to check out, I just haven’t done my homework on when using it on Windows plus I never know what laptop to get after this one breaks down (Mac/PC), then the whole 64 bit thing, upgrading, it starts to cascade into a to-do list. A quick search resulted in some folks (Windows) having to download drivers for the FA-66 however.
I am looking also for a new audio interface (usb).
I would use it also for live purposes. I would like to route some tracks of a pattern to the master, what the audience hears also, and these tracks plus some other tracks to a monitor (headphone) which I can listen to only.
I read in the forum somewhere, that this is also possible (I hope it is still).
Currently, I have the FocusRite Scarlett 8i6 in mind: http://www.focusrite.com/products/audio_interfaces/scarlett_8i6/
Would it be possible with it?
@td6d: as you have a similar Focusrite, maybe you can check that? Would be great.
I used to have an M-Audio Fast Track Pro that I eventually returned as it gave me so much crap with their buggy drivers on Win7 x64.
I ended up finding a second hand RME Fireface 400 which has been a dream come true for me, not only are the ins and outs far better quality, the drivers rock, the device is solid and I’ve had zero issues with it.
After doing a lot of research I’ve come to the conclusion that Firewire is also far better than USB, less CPU overhead.
I think my preference would be PCI -> FW -> USB
Absolutely loving my RME 