Open Mic: What Advice Would You Give to a Beginner About Audio Interfaces?

Each week we open our mic to readers and lurkers alike to come out of the woodwork and tell us your thoughts and opinion, your experiences and mistakes, what you love and what you hate. We want to hear from you, and here’s your chance.

We all need a decent way of getting the sounds we're recording onto our computers. But a beginner is unlikely to have any sort of audio interface - just a mic or line-in jack. What advice would you give them? What sort of audio interface should they get? And how soon should they get it?