Line 6 POD HD Desktop (Bean) Guitar Multi Effects Unit - $314 Shipped from Hello Music

This unit is typically $399 at most retailers. Hello Music has it for $325 , you can lower it to $305 with a coupon code of FIRSTTIME20 . Shipping of $9 brings the grand total to $314. A pretty good deal on a cool piece of gear!

Line 6 POD HD Desktop at Hello Music

They also have the POD HD 500 floor pedal type unit for $398.

POD HD 500 at Hello Music

Sweetwater has the bag for the POD bean units at a good price too. They are $29.99 shipped but usually $39.99 everywhere else. They're nice heavy duty padded gig bags with an extra compartment for toting your headphones and cables and whatnot.

POD bag at Sweetwater

amheck said:   Hey guys, maybe you can help here.

I used to play but have been out of it for a number of years. I'd like to get a PC interface that allows me to mess with presets and settings on the PC. WOuld something like this be best, or would I want to look for something like the Guitar Port series? Not looking to do any recording, just messing around.

The cool thing about the POD is that you can do both. You can use this as a USB interface to get your guitar signal into the computer for other programs and you can use the free Line 6 editing program to change all of the parameters in a patch and save them to build up a library of different patches and banks. There are also tons of free downloadable tone patches that pros and regular joes have put out there. The advantage this unit has, as opposed to the Guitar Port, is that the POD doesn't require much processing power from your computer to use. The Guitar Port relies on your sound card and CPU to generate sounds.
Then, if you just want to use it as a standalone headphone amp for late-night jamming without waking up the kids or wife you can do that too. Or you can feed the output to a clean power amp or the effects loop return of a big amp and get all of your sounds for playing with a band. It's a very versatile tool.

Here's the PDF manual of the POD Edit software