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Howdy,
I'm looking into getting one of them. I tried using Garageband with my Mac for recording musical ideas down but it is not working for me. The computer seems to make things more complicated. A friend of mine has a portable Tascam multi track recorder and it worked great when I recorded my first song demo. I'm looking to do simple guitar/piano and vocals for my demos. How many tracks should I get, do most of them have the option to burn the song to recordable media, what's this phantom power I'm hearing about, and should I get 24 bit or 16 bit audio? Thanks for all of your help.

Anymore I'm sure most of them have at the very least a usb cable to connect to the computer. How many tracks really depends on how many things you plan to record at once. Phantom power is for condenser mics that need phantom power to operate, a dynamic or ribbon mic doesn't need it. 24-bit is preferable to 16-bit. I just noticed some either burn the cd themselves or have an SD card that you can plug in the computer.

look into the zoom r16 or r24. they function stand-a-lone, as an interface for getting tracks into the computer, and as a a controller. 24bit . . . SD card storage (cheap & no moving parts to break) plus USB if you want to load tracks that way.

I'm a big fan of my Zoom R16. It's unreal what they've packed into such a portable, inexpensive package.

Cheers, Eliot.

dtrain1234 wrote:Howdy,
I'm looking into getting one of them. I tried using Garageband with my Mac for recording musical ideas down but it is not working for me. The computer seems to make things more complicated. A friend of mine has a portable Tascam multi track recorder and it worked great when I recorded my first song demo. I'm looking to do simple guitar/piano and vocals for my demos. How many tracks should I get, do most of them have the option to burn the song to recordable media, what's this phantom power I'm hearing about, and should I get 24 bit or 16 bit audio? Thanks for all of your help.

I would re think this idea if I were you. If you progress n your music and you want to more with it, you will require more from your recording set up. Pretty soon you will be syncing your recorder with your computer and you will be right back in the computer world again.

Just make sure you do allot of research and sleep on things and see the bigger picture down the road before you commit to a purchase.

Dwayne, if he decides to record straight into the computer the r16/24 is supposed to be a pretty decent interface for that, plus it's a DAW controller. being able to track without dealing with any computer issues is just sort of icing on the cake if you're into that sort of thing. Hate to sound like a fanboy because I've never actually used the unit but it sounds like a good idea. You can link two of them and track 16 tracks at once also I think, so it really could be a pretty good "down the road" option.

Personally I can't think of any disadvantages to tracking outside of a computer environment & then dumping tracks into a DAW for mixing/mastering except for the added time it takes to drag & drop files into the 'puter.

I'm open to hearing them though . . . I've been trying to save the dinero for a Radar system to do just that, but everytime one pops up for a decent price there seems to be something else that takes the funds. It's looking more and more like I might have to give up and spring for a couple of the zoom units and a really good pre-amp/converter solution so if anyone knows any negatives on these things please don't hold back!

billg1 wrote: Personally I can't think of any disadvantages to tracking outside of a computer environment & then dumping tracks into a DAW for mixing/mastering except for the added time it takes to drag & drop files into the 'puter.

Thats right but this person wanted to avoid the computer all together it sounded like.

If that's the case, leaving a DAW out of the picture all together might be pretty hard to do in this day & time.

Anyway, looks like the op has left the arena!