I’ve been recording with Fostex 4-track tape drives for 20 years now!? Wow. I didn’t realize it had been that long. Anyway, it was time to upgrade the studio. I went back and forth trying to decide whether I wanted to do all the recording work in something like ProTools on the computer (requiring an interface of some kind), or if I wanted a dedicated recorder. Eventually I decided on the dedicated recorder for a few reasons. I’m not always recording at my house, so that would have meant I’d have to lug the laptop out, and I didn’t like that idea since it basically runs my personal office. Having done a fair amount of recording using software, I know I much prefer twiddling knobs, hitting buttons and moving sliders to clicking on things on-screen (when recording), and if I decide to move away from the Mac in the future (I would only move back to Linux) I’d be stuck with some useless software. Another consideration was my slow old G4 which struggles running GarageBand so I think I’d be very unhappy with ProTools.

I managed to unpack, get everything connected and set up to record a new project (including a condenser mic requiring phantom power), record four tracks of music, mix them down, transfer the mix to the Mac, tweak the id3 and upload to the podcast in around 4 hours! This thing is so easy to operate, I’m kicking myself for not getting it sooner.