Hey Chuck!!! Thanks!!
you have to haul out the manual every time you want to record a quick idea, and then your idea evaporates while you are trying to remember which buttons to push...
I can understand that. I spent several hours playing with it yesterday, so, I was able to get something going with that. I was able to get the hang of it, tho'. Of course, reading the manual helped.
It has all these drum and bass sounds on board, but you can't sequence freely with them, you can only build songs from a standard set of patterns, which is very limiting, and also overly complicated to work with too.
that's why I don't really plan on using them all that much. My palm pilot with the synth clip on (or
the Yamaha MU-5 via a Mac Connector) IS my backup band.
It also does make a reasonably decent guitar "modeler," though it's not as good as my POD so I rarely use it for that, even.
If I were a guitarist, I'd take that advice too. As it stands, I've heard what other people did with it AS guitarists, and was impressed enough.
Finally, you need a way to read the data disk into the computer. Not a big deal, but one more piece of gear you need and one more step to mess with.
Well, I had a card reader already, so it wasn't that big a deal. I DID find a freeware program that allows me to convert the resident audio files to CD-quality wave files, so that was cool. I could hear a difference between that and the files I normally record on the laptop (24-bit, 48K resolution), but, for a machine like that, I thought it was pretty cool.
Tascam has a similar device that has a MIDI interface on it so you have a lot more flexibility -- you can use Standard MIDI files instead of a paltry set of drum and bass patterns. It also has a USB port. I haven't tried it, but its user interface could hardly be worse than the Zoom's.
Yeah, the Pocketstudio 5. I was considering getting that, but, #1, I already have a sequencer on my palm pilot, from which I can transfer MIDI files to my laptop, and I can use two synths with it, so getting a pocketstudio, for me, would have been redundant.
#2, You can't really record MIDI files into it, from my understanding, even tho' it does have a midi in. You have to get your files from your computer, transform them into whatever format Pocketstudio uses, and THEN use them in the Pocketstudio.
So you're back to square one, anyway.
Besides, that thing is HUGE!!!
And I don't really have 400 bucks to throw around at the drop of a hat. Some Tascam's customers over at their site were complaing that the price dropped so quickly after the product was released. Kinda told me something....