Specific and general recording

[cursivecake]

Hey, I'm pretty desperate for good advice so any would be appreciated.
I have a few thousand dollars to buy equipment with. I grew up on four tracks and have dabbled with recording, editing, mixing on PC. Basically, I want to get to as close to analog as is possible but record on a laptop. I'm sure this question gets bantied around alot, but hear me out. I want to do a very natural sounding record, mostly acoustic instruments, but also need 24 or more track capabilities, cut, paste all that good stuff and I don't want it to sound like a crappy home pc recording (although crappy analog is great, you know) Looking for warm but efficient. Just some software that is basic but supports alot of tracks and any other compressors/boxes/i dunno or things like that to make it. Thanks in advance for advice.

[ssscientist]

Try Tracktion. It's quick to learn and has no upper limit to the number of tracks you can use. It also comes with a whole raft of useful plugins, most notably a set of Mackie compressors that are among the best soft compressors I've used. You need a good quick laptop to get 24 tracks going at once, but you probably already knew that.

You will also need an audio interface, either Firewire or USB. Here's one, here's another and here's a third. The difference between these three is the number of simultaneous tracks you will be able to record --- with the first two you can record two audio tracks at a time and with the last one eight at a time.

And welcome to the board!

[emergencyexit]

Get a MOTU A/D and some pres and mics? do you have any of those?