Woohoo, moved into the world of 4 track

Ok, so not horribly exciting for those of you with 8 track or more recording, but I just picked up an Akai DR4d hard disk recorder for $150. On its own this isn't a great deal since the 200MB hard drive can only hold 10 minutes of 4 track, but I popped open the lid and installed a 4GB drive that I had in the closet and I can now record about 3 hours worth of 4 track data.

Time for me to spend time getting this sucker wired to my mixing board. I'm stoked.

 

hehehehe, didn't want to do the cassette tape 4 track and didn't want to spend a ton of money. I was quite pleased when I saw this thing appear in the local consignment shop. Wasn't trying to cause trouble here, but this find did get me excited. I'm going to keep my eyes open on eBay to see if I can get another one cheap. You can link them together with a cable that synchronizes them and let's you do 8 track or more.

I also found out for $55 that I can buy a software upgrade which let's you do 256 virtual tracks recording 4 tracks at a time. This option doesn't really excite me, but adding another DR4d for 8 real tracks does.

 

You can either think of them as a computer or as a tape recorder that has only one reel. My intent is to put it in a mobile rack and use it to record live gigs. I'll probably also mess with it at home some and see how I can use it to make music.