Line 6 Inc. on Friday announced the release of TonePort, its first line of USB-based recording interfaces. The TonePort UX1 and UX2 are designed to enable guitar, bass and vocal musicians to use their Macs or PCs to record music; the devices ship with Line 6’s GearBox modeling software.
The TonePort UX1 features a mic input with preamp, guitar or bass instrument input, stereo line inputs and outputs, stereo headphone jack and an analog merge monitoring input. The TonePort UX2 adds analog VU meters, a second microphone input and preamp, phantom power for both preamps, stereo digital S/PDIF output, dual footswitch jacks and independent volume controls for the headphone and main outputs. Both devices support 44.1/48kHz with 16/24-bit recording, a 96kHz mode and include ASIO, WDM and Core Audio drivers.
GearBox provides guitar and bass amplifier and cabinet modeling, stompbox and studio effects and microphone preamp modeling. Based on Line 6’s Pod XT and Bass Pod XT products, GearBox includes 16 guitar amplifier models, five bass amp models, and 24 stompbox and studio effects.
Also includes is Ableton Live Lite, Line 6 Edition music recording software.
Line 6 did not announce pricing for the TonePort devices — the company’s Web site indicates the devices will be arriving “in Winter 2005.” System requirements call for a G4/800MHz or faster, Mac OS X v10.4 or later, 512MB RAM, 1GB hard disk space and 5400RPM or faster hard disk drive.