any recommendations for a budget - midrange XLR interface?
I'd avoid the super cheap Behringers, M-Audios, and the like. These will typically be noisy and have essentially no resale value in the future, while quality brands hold most of their value and can be re-sold later if/when upgrading.
My use case is remote guitar lessons. I need an instrument in and a microphone in. My Microphone is the Audio Technica ATR2100 I bought a few years back.
After doing a lot of research, I bought the behringer with the agreement that if I use it enough and it’s a limiting factor on what I’m doing, I will upgrade to the UA Volt II when it actually is on sale and not just pre-order. But the limiting factor in my signal chain is the compression on Skype… so I just went with a cheapie interface it gets the job done. There is some noise I pick up when monitoring with Sony MDR-V6’s and I need the volume up pretty high to get good direct monitoring levels, but overall testing has gone well.
Again, if I had a more important use case or I was recording, I’d spend for the focusrite or just wait for the UA Volt II. But this is “Streets Ahead” of just using a laptop mic with my electric guitar unplugged (or to my headphones) because my kid is sleeping. The other option I had was just to swap between microphone and guitar, but that made lessons awkward.
It's a different approach, and has more buttons/knobs, but provides a high quality and free solution supporting rooms and multiple participants. Can be incorporated into OBS as well for recording, streaming etc.
I've found it to be a useful tool for connecting with musicians remotely.