Oh my friend! I had the exact same question about 60 days ago. I spent $1,000 on Focusrite Audio Interface gear, which is great, but not NEARLY as good as my final solution. So, after I'd already dropped $1,000 on Focusrite, I was still struggling with a dying old analog console, with limited busses and such. At the time I was using Cakewalk Sonar, by the way.
So I did some research, and determined that the PreSonus console line was far superior to anything else on the market.
I bought the Studio Live 32, and it came with Studio One Professional, version 3, INCLUDED.
Now I can record all 32 channels from the console into Studio One, at the same time, if I choose to (such as a live band).
I'm just passed 30 days into it, and so far we've tracked some vocals, drums (8 tracks at once) and some guitar tracks, and everything is awesome. The really cool thing, is, for example in my case, I can use the console 'fat channel' (gate, compressor, limiter, eq) on each drum channel, and set the console to send to Studio One POST AUX, meaning that the signal I'm recording comes AFTER the inserts and effects from the console. The reason this is so great, is it allows me to maximize/optimize my signal / raw track, while limiting to protect against digital clipping.
On my old analog board, I thought I was pretty cool with 8 monitor mixes, as limited as they were. Now, with the Studio Live 32, I have 20 mixes and each CHANNEL can have it's own 'effects rack' (called "Fat Channel") using built in effects/signal processing.
I can't begin to tell you how blown away you will be with the PreSonus Studio Live console. Check videos on YouTube and PreSonus website. I'm a new user who is extremely impressed with this huge leap into the future. I've barely scratched the surface of what this thing can do. It's like drinking from the fire hose. Although it can be overwhelming to look at EVERYTHING it does, I was able to focus on the essentials and get up and running pretty quick.
P.S. I believe you can even use the rack mount expansion units to add on more channels. You can look into those details, but they have a 32 channel rack-mount version of of the Studio Live series, a.k.a 'stage box?', that is something like the business end of a snake, yet it can be ran as a stand-alone mixer as well. So, I believe you could so the 32 channel console, and put the rack mount in the other room where your snake ran to, and save money on upgrading XLR cabling as well as Audio interfaces. I called PreSonus and asked a few pre-purchase questions, then jumped in. No regrets.
