FD-8 to Computer retrospective

[pjenne]

I just completed a CD after recording the whole thing on the FD8. (All me, baby, except a fiddle in one bridge.) Anyway, despite the forum's total absence of current FD8 threads (undoubtedly due to the FD8's short distribution life), I thought I'd share thoughts. I never used a computer to edit my recordings until within the last two or three weeks. These comments have to do with the FD-8 to Computer interaction.
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An FD-8 is not all you need. It will give you a pretty good demo as long as you don't multi-track too hard, but as soon as you do that, you are just torturing yourself needlessly by not using the graphical interface available on your computer.

Without some sort of wave editing software on the computer, any cutting and pasting you do will inherently be flawed because while the scrubbing mode is very helpful, it is from the quick-and-dirty school of scrubbing. Your paste can never be better than roughly where you meant to put it, which is almost always fine, but on tracks that are doubled in any way, you can not put the tracks together 'in phase' which will make it sound funny. The computer will cut your editing time by 90%, too. On a serious project at least, you will need to hook up to the computer.

Nevertheless, the FD-8 is great! It already has all you need to get something recorded without having to screw around with a computer. Once you start with the computer, you will be glad you used the FD-8 to record, because the computer interface is nowhere near as sleek and intuitive as the FD-8, which feels more like a traditional tape recorder. Turn it on, push record, and start playing. And it's digital. And when you're ready to put it on a computer, the FD-8 is ready for you.

The FD-8 has FireWire (optical) and ADAT, two standards that are perfect for getting your tracks to the computer. I've had the FD8 for years now, and there's no problem yet on the horizon for compatibility. It also comes with a serial cable connection (like to a zip drive) but my computer was too far away to mess with that. Both of those require spiffier sound cards than your typical computer is equipped with. Failing those, you can go out the rca jacks (like to a stereo amp) into any regular sound card's microphone jack, and move two tracks at a time into your computer.

You do need software to "receive" and edit the tracks, and I'm no expert on this. (I just write songs, really.) But I used WaveLab and found it pretty comfortable even for a newbie. Being able to monitor the sound well on your computer may require some better speakers and a sound card, anyway.

Before the computer, I used to mix down to a tape that I could play in my car, and I was pretty happy. Now I can never go back! I'll be doing much more of the process on my PC in the future.

~pjenne