Hardware advice

[rt2726]

I currently record guitar through my PC at home using a USB cable straight from a Line6 PODxtl. Now I want to take it on the road and I don't want to carry a computer with me to band practice so I've been looking at some of the digital 8-track recorders (BOSS BR-600 etc.) and I'm really not sure if I'm overlooking the obvious. I already spent money on an MBOX that I no longer use because of driver issues and ProTools issues so I'm trying to avoid making similar mistakes on this piece of gear so here's what my requirements are:

• Recording - I would like to record guitar, vocals and probably bass at band practice when learning new songs especially for practicing at home during the week. I have jamstix so I'll probably add drums at home if I get board since mic'ing drums is probably going to be more trouble than it's worth.
• Number of tracks - I would think that recording two or three at a time would be good enough for what I'm doing. Most of the units seem to playback more than they record but I'm guessing 8 tracks playback would be plenty since I expect the drums to be on a single track.
• Editing - I plan to do most major editing and mixing on the computer but I'm sure I'll end up tweaking some things during the intial recording phase.
• Playback - I want to use this as a practice tool. I'm sure all of the machines do a great job with that but playback for accompaniment would be nice for 'solo' open mic stuff or if one of our band members can't make it to practice. I want to be able to plug into our PA and mute certain tracks etc.
• Memory - Some machines have flash memory, some hard drive and some even have CD drives. I'll probably have 30 or more 'projects' that I want to access. I'm not talking about just playing back a final mix I still want all the seperate tracks. I don't want to juggle 20 mini flash cards around especially if I end up using it for live performances.
• Speaking of live performance... the option of using built in drum samples and/or loading my own drum tracks from Jamstix would be really cool. How about a footswitch for start/stop???

Maybe I'm asking for way too much in one device. If I need more than one piece of hardware I'm open to that too. How much coin should I expect to drop on something like this? As of right now I've been trying to keep it under a grand and I'd like it to be fairly portable.

Sorry for the long post. Any help / advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!
-Rich

 

[rt2726]

Well, I've narrowed it down a little...

I think I am definitley going to make sure the unit has a hard drive due to the size of my projects but I hope it won't introduce too much noise. USB connectivity to transfer WAV files to the comuputer. 2 simultaneous inputs minimum although 4 would be nice. CD ROM would be nice. It doesn't seem like anyone offers a footswitch for playback. Maybe I could do something with MIDI??? I suppose I can insert 2 or 3 bars of silence and then a count in if worse comes to worse.

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