The Opinion Review

I was looking for a digital machine that was cheap and as easy to use as the 4 track tascam cassette recorder I had used for years. I always have tons of song ideas laying or spinning in my head and it’s good to just turn on a recorder and form it into a song…Track by track.

That’s how I operate… I don’t have time to sit and carfully craft a song start to finish.. I have done this many times before but often songs are created by simply recording something off the cuff…Then adding to it later…

The Fostex MR8 sounded like the perfect machine to do this… It was $300 at the time I bought it (back when I actually had some money to spend) and was supposed to be easy to use. It has many in and out jacks and was the first to be able to simply plug into a USB and export to a computer… It also has a built in mike so you could record on the fly…And it could be run on batteries… It all sounded so great…

A problem I had with it is that you couldn’t record very long… It recorded on a compact flash card. 128MB. When I tried to use another card it wouldn’t work. Then the machine crashed completely. I still have it because it will come on once in awhile and “tease” me like it’s gonna work and allow me to throw up some tracks… Then it simply shuts down by itself… I tried to take it to a shop but of course no one around here works on things like that… “You have to send it to the dealer” - No thanks…

As far as being as easy to use as a 4 track cassette? Not so… It is digital and therefore has “computer like language” that has to be learned in order to get the one song recorded that the memory card can hold… I found myself sitting with a manual much of the time trying to get the one song recored start to finish..

Did that one song turn out good? Sure… But I like to record a LOT of songs..So… I have moved on…Still, it sits there staring at me… Telling me I could take it to the park and record a song… I would if it would just stay powered up…  Geeze…

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