Yo, Funny girl, welcome to the board! There are a lot of units that can record 8 tracks, but usually *not* at one time. If you have the right inputs,
my Roland VS1824CD can do all of what you say, but it's $2000 unit. Even then, to get really high quality recordings, I use a lot of outboard gear to bypass its analog-digital converter, and its mediocre preamps.
To be able to give you more help, it would be useful to know what you really intend to record, and what your real budget is. Generally recording 8 tracks at once would be a whole band, with multiple mics on the drums. Just the mics to do that will set you back plenty. As a good starter unit, I kind of like
Boss BR1180CD. I don't think it will record all 8 tracks simultaneously, though, most of them don't.
I think most people here would suggest using your computer as a recorder for more versatility, upgradeability, and overall cost-effectiveness, but I do happen to like stand alones for their portability and relative ease of use. You need to start planning a budget for the whole shebang, as this can get expensive quickly. That is one of the advantages of the standalone units, they have an initial completeness. If you have 1 or 2 good mics, some good cables, and a couple of boom stands, you can begin recording now, then you build from there, with the final act being the replacement of the recorder. I'm getting there myself.
It goes like this- You've got everything in one box. Preamps, compression, reverb, multitracking capability, Analog-Digital conversion, and so on. So pretty soon, you realize that if top preamps are $1000+ per channel, and you've got 8 of them in your $1000 box, they're probably not that good. Problem is, you're right. So you buy an expensive preamp. But the effects aren't that good, so you buy an FX box. But the A-D converter isn't that good, so you buy an A-D converter, etc. etc. Eventually, you end up just buying something to record with, either a hard drive digital recorder or a computer.sound card/software combination with a DAW (digital audio workstation), to replace your recorder, and you're good to go- for about $15,000! Yikes!
What most people don't realize, is there never was a problem. In the end, if you want to make really professional quality recordings, you'll need several thousand dollars worth of gear. I'm up to about $15,000 right now. But you will also need experience, which you can get with that stand alone recorder. So finally, you upgrade to the recorder that can make good use of all those outboard goodies you bought, and you keep the stand alone for a remote recorder!
The point is that a box that does everything for XYZ dollars can only do each of those things so well, but that's really OK, because it gives you a learning tool. Figure out what you really want to record, how much total initial budget you have, and what you already have (computers, headphones, instruments, stereo equipment, everything) and what you intend to do with the music you've recorded. Then post that up, and people here on the board will give you confusing and often conflicting advice, which nonetheless will be helpful in the long run. Hope this helps.-Richie
