I would think the processor speed will be enough to do the Full Duplex work, but probably not run any plug-in effects. And of course your harddisk has to be fast enough also. The best thing to do is just try it, and seewhat happens.
As far as what the "normal" people do. It doesn't have to only be eight tracks, and it doesn't have to be stereo pairs. Most instruments work better as a mono track, and then panned into a stereo mix.
Even when I am recording drums, I will record each drum to a seperate track (Bass drum on onetrack, snare on one, high hat on one, etc, etc), and then you can pan them into the stereo mix so you've got one cymbal coming out the right speaker and another coming out the left, and your toms are rolling from left to right, etc, etc. Plus it gives to the power to EQ and process each sound individually to give you the best sounding drum kit in your final mix. So, for instance, you can take your individual drum tracks. Say you have two seperate cymbals, snare, bass drum, and the high hat. You pan a cymbal hard left, on hard right, the bass and snare to center, and the hi-hat slighl\y right of center. Now you have 5 seperate audio tracks recorded, but you play them out your Gina (for example) 7/8 OUT pair. You have a stereo mix of drums coming out 7/8. Now you have a bass guitar. No sense in wasting space for a stereo track, so you record it as a mono track, and pan it center. You can send that out Gina's (for example) 6 out, and then on the 5 out, you could send out your mono track electric guitar, and pan then mid left, etc, etc, etc, etc. This is all assuming you have an external mixer. If you DON'T then you need to make all of these adjustments in your program. In that case you would send all of your tracks out one stereo pair on Gina, and make panning and volume adjustments in your software.
And yes, doing it on many, many tracks is how the professionals will do it. It may take up a lot of space, but it gives you more flexibility and control over your mix. You can always later back the files up and remove it from your hard disk to reclaim space.
Any more questions?
Jeff
Are you mixing on an external mixer or internally?
