Hi
Ok....
You can use that microphone outside. But it requires phantom power (i.e. a 48v power supply, usually a desk or IO unit supplies this). If you intend to capture environmental souns using a portable DAT or mini disc, they won't have a 48v power supply. In fact, outside you have to run on batteries, unless you have a very long power cable, and battery units do not supply this voltage.
So either get 2 microphones (a non-phantom power one to be portable, and a good studio mic) or get one good quality non-phantom power mic (recommendations anyone?)
The firewire device (FW410) has 2 analogue INs, several analogue OUTs (8 I think), timecode support, and MIDI in and out. There are other units that will provide something.
To make sounds using MIDI you have to use a synth or sampler (either an external hardware unit, a soundcard with synth/sample support, or a software synth/sampler).
MIDI is control information, like what note, or how long the note is, or how loud. The actual sounds are created by a synth or sampler. MIDI tells the synth or sampler to make play the sound that corresponds to the note, and to play it that lound and for that long.
So if you have an external synth or sampler you will need a physical MIDI IO.
If you do not have an external synth you can use you laptop soundcard (not very good quality) or get another pc based sound generator (software synth, pcmcia card, usb/firewire device).
To play audio/wave files you can do this in several ways, but the most obvious is by directly adding the files to logic as an audio track. You would do this for a 'real' instrument recording, like a vocal. These recordings can be processed with an effect, or moved in time.
I'm not a Logic user, so I can't advise on specifics, but if Logic can't import audio tracks, it must be the worst sequencer prog there is, and I don't believe that. Could you be trying to add a wave file to a Midi track? Is it being added but just not playing back? If so, have you set up logic to work with your sound card? Have you selected that card as an output? Just some thoughts...
Cheers
John