While my initial experience with this recorder was great, I am going to have to return it. The provided 128mb Compact Flash card is insufficient for recording anyything substantial. Unless you are willing to deal with the hassle of transferring your work to a computer after every song or two you will need a 1gb card, and they are virtually impossible to find. No major electronics retailer in my city carries them. I ordered two cards from the included list of compatible cards supposedly tested by boss. They did not work. Boss customer service told me that manufacturers sometimes change card specs. Great. They then advised me on where to acquire cards. I purchased two more. These also did not work. I now have several cards which I purchased from internet retailers that are incompatible, and I am too frustrated and have spent too much money to continue this fruitless search. Please be forewarned about investing in a recorder that relies on outdated and virtually unavailable memory technology!

I was in the market for an 8 track digital recorder to record my new but rapidly developing rock band. I was also looking for a drum machine to help me compose songs when working on solo projects. When I found this, I was pretty excited, but also nervous, as dedicated machines tend to be better and less complicated.

Having had this machine a few weeks now, I can honestly say I'm thrilled. It does everything it advertises and the results are better than I anticipated. I've read reviews and it seems half of them say the manual is useless and the other half say it's a piece of cake. I have to say I come down in the middle. The manual is very helpful, but leaves out some details that are necessary to doing things that I wanted to do. Overall, while the setup is necessarily complex (many features in a small device) they are generally very intuitive and once you're used to it, you can do it pretty efficiently.

It does require some patience, some experimentation, and some re-reading of the manual, but it's not that bad as some make it out to seem.

For the record, my only real recording experience was with an old Fostex x-12 4 track cassette recorder. I'm pretty good with computers and digital menus don't bother me too much. If you spend time with this product, it will perform well for you. Drum sounds are very good and versatile. I really love it.

yo, i use this primarily for capturing the initial recording, as well as doing a quick mix. i generally use a good 15-20 tracks per song, and so do a lot of bouncing in the midst of recording. the v-tracks are an awesome feature, and are a huge advantage when compared to other digital recorders in the same price range. i generally do track by track recording before bouncing tracks onto the computer where i do the real editing, but i do use this to record jams as well, in combination with my behringer mixer. getting a decent mixer to accesorize this recorder is a must if you're going to be doing solid acoustic recordings. in any case, i'm all over the place in terms of what i record, and this has accompanied me through the past several years. i'm now in the 400s in songs started, and hope to do another 400! great product! peace!

Ok, I've had some time to use this product. I use it for singer/songwriter type recordings and it works very well. I also use the onboard mics to record our worship team at church and it sounds amazing for just room recording. Mixing and mastering is easy - just use the preset stuff and you'll sound like a genius. Awesome product for the price.

Where do I begin with on this product? Well, I been using it for about a year now and have recorded two demo albums and two full length album that have been signed to a small indie black metal label. Its features and overall quality and features for the price is a great deal. Though don't think you will get sound quality that sounds over-produced. It includes built in condensor mics that are very powerful, the only problem is that they gather a lot more things than you want to be recorded. They are not good to use if you live on a street with cars coming up and down them. Also the amp mod is good but it is not a substitute for an actual amp. The reasons are is because its not powerful enough, and if you play music that needs good use of distortion the recorders amp mod and distortion causes way to many back ground crackles. Of course, messing with the cains and peak dials will change that, the final songs are very faint at times. There are many effects built in, some good some not so good. Some of the distortion effects are either to "bassy" or thin in its stock form.

The manual is ok, I learned much from it, but got more info from youtube vids. Though it tells the basics of what you will nedd to know, though if you are new to the world of digital recording, the technical terms used will leave you in a stupor.

The recorder only comes with a mic adaptor cord and 128mb memory card. Ontop of that you will need to get an AC/DC power adaptor and 1gig memoery card. I found it strange though that some brands are not compatible with this recorder and it only supports up to 1gig. So if you are recording a full length album of heavily layered textures...you might run in a few snags, but I found that I have had plenty room with just 1 gig for album recodings.

Overall, the recorder is easy to use, but with all the extras it offer it takes some time to get a hang of it all. The drum machine and its tone load features are the hardest part of the entire product, but is easy to learn when you get the principles down. If you are looking for a decent recorder for a good deal, this is the way to go.

The only cons that I found is, the built in effects and amp mid are weak but oddly causes more peak crackles than it should, use a tube amp with a good pedal. Also,all the EQ and gain ajustments are all through menus and interfaces, so you will do a lot of time in a menu on this recorder, then again tatma be a good thing since a portable 8track with exposed EQ knobs can be broken off if you travel a lot while recording. The final would be the fact tracks 5/6 and 7/8 are combines on one track as a stero track. So if you do record with 2 tracks simulatanous recording for several takes...it will lower the amount of space you can work with. Also get some good monitors for mix down and mastering since what sounds good through headphones may not be such a good mix through speakers(especially a laptop's)

Overall a good recorder that I truly love.