Depends on your budget. You may want to ask how important your future recording needs will be. Based on that decision you may want to save up for a Mackie Onyx or RME fireface.

Sounds like your student budget would fit a Presonus Firepod. Could that be a good option? Keep in mind IMO some of the best drum sounds are captured with L R stereo pair overhead mics. Mic the kick and snare in addition if you need to bring them out more in your mix.

Thanks for the Info. I have been looking a the Prosonus but I did not know if that was a good interface of not. Also I have been trying to find an Aardvark q10 because i have heard that they work really well and that they have been dicontinued so you can sometimes find they on ebay for a cheap price.

Presonus Firestudio has been a wonderful interface for the 2+ years I have been using it. I have a good friend who uses the firepod. They are good quality for the most part.

Stay with firewire its better for audio and for latency issues that can arise with 8 channel usb interfaces.

You may also want to look at another PCI card interface. PCI/PCIe cards have the lowest latency. RME makes the Hammerfall series etc.

That said, the Fireface and the Onyx mixers are great options. The Presonus gets good marks here at RO generally as well. Yet another option would be the Allen Heath ZED R16 but that is likely out of your budget range even used.

i recommend an alesis iO|26
http://www.alesis.com/io26
runs firewire
goes for about 250 used
has 8 mic inputs
check it out

I am not a fan of the Alesis gear except for the HD24XR. The Multimix is multi problematic so I'm a bit leery of the IO26.

I forgot to mention the two problems I have encountered with the PreSonus FireStudio and my mid 2007 MacBook.

#1:There is a slight noise issue with the left channel of the main output. This is only a concern with the D to A of the main output and has nothing to do with outputs 1-8, which are dead silent.

My reasoning is that if you must get around this you should look at running the spdif out into a presonus Central Station or preamp of the like. This makes the output much more controllable and clean. Not to mention the ability to switch your monitoring to other sources on the fly.

I think that considering the price of this unit that you should expect some minor drawbacks, this is one of them. Although its not a concern for me, I have heard others very upset with the problem.

#2 There are concerns with drivers. To get an idea visit the presonus forum and take a look at what others are saying about the particular product you have interest in, taking into account the system you will be running on. I had updated my firmware and drivers several times with issues. Unfortunately I think PreSonus has a bit of trouble trying to keep up with all systems and configurations on each new update. Expect to spend some quality time researching your requirements on their site:

http://forums.presonus.com/