Equipment for recording my beats...??

[13th Disciple]

Aight, here's the deal.

I'm going to start working on my first official album, and I want this to be COMPLETELY legit. By saying that, I mean that all the beats are exclusive which I own complete rights to and can use on my own album without owing anybody anything.

Since buying beats from MP3.com producers is way too expensive for my budget, I've decided that I'm going to get into producing my own beats. I've owned a Roland XP-30 for a little over year now. But here's my dillema:

I couldn't hook it up to my computer properly. Whatever I did, there's always a problem. Cakewalk is just a demo version and couldn't export tracks to waves, Cubase doesn't record the MIDI, etc. etc. etc. I've given up on using my computer.

So now my second and possibly the only option I have left is to buy an external mixer/sequencer. If I only bought the XP-60 instead of this I wouldn't have these troubles, but I didn't. Anyway, the question is: what kind of mixer should I look for?

Should I buy a digital 8-track? Or should I go with an analog 4-track mixer? Do standalone sequencers for synthesizers exist? I'm thinking digital 8-tracks would be much better for making beats with a synthesizer, but if standalone MIDI sequencers DO exist, then I would go for that.

Help!!