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I've had really great results running through an ART tube preamp into a Tascam interface. That said, it only really works for clean tones; I still have to figure out how to get good overdriven sounds using DI.

Try out pedals with your DI rig, you can find one that may not necessarily sound good with your normal gear but works great for DI (or settings have to be radically changed).

Various multifx work well for this, since they're generally designed to be played into a clean something.

lately i've been using the preamp out from my Electar Tube 10 practice amp--which is my only amp that's currently healthy--into the PodXT as a digitizer and then into Audacity on the Mac. i'll probably do the same thing when i start doing band-ish demos. i get the 12AX7 flavor of the amp and then have the various amp models on the Pod which i tweaked endlessly as well as the amp models in GarageBand that i haven't even messed with yet. i would like to get a USB interface with more features, but then i'm not recording albums in the spare room at the moment.

Guitar Rig 5.

The medium gain models (All of the Marshalls and the OD120) are pretty much crap but the clean and high-gain amps are awesome. Also has a shitload of crazy filtering effects that can make it sound nasty.