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40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
superb but room for improvement.............., 15 July 2007
Don't get me wrong - this gadget deserves 5 stars in terms of customer satisfaction - high quality recording and very portable - it functions as a perfectly serviceable recording studio but more important from my point of view it's excellent for live recording- gigs rehearsals and outside projects. The on board microphone produces higher quality sound than you might expect and using an external mike ( I use a Sony ECM-MS907 ) through the dedicated input an you get excellent stereo reproduction. Line in allows recoprding straight from a mixer desk. Features too numerous to catalogue but the 130 page manual is clear and once you get used to the interface its reasonably intuitive to use. Looks stylish and the display is easy to read unless you're in bright sunshine. Computer connectability excellent.
So why not 5 stars? Well - it could be better. For one thing it would be nice to be able to save to Wav format instead of the Micro's own idiosyncratic format. You can record directly to MP3 but only as a single track recording. Also it'd be nice to be able to record more than a single track at once. Converting between formats 'on board' takes an age. The unit is very nicely packaged but lacking in essentials like an AC adaptor, battery life with rechargeables is not too bad though.
However - once in a while you get a piece of kit that you get 'attached' to and its shortcomings become slightly endearing - I'm sure it wouldnt be too difficult to produce a software patch that enables easy conversion of to a more usable format for working with tracks on a computer.
The portability of this unit is the key feature - and if that's your key requirement then it makes such a good stab at doing a range of things that larger or more costly units do in a dedicated way that you're not likely to be disappointed. Buy!
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great musical tools, 23 Aug 2007
I hadn't played guitar and written songs in a couple of decades but mid-life drove me back earlier this year. I checked out plenty of reviews, along with a few gadgets and the Micro-BR seemed to fit the bill for my modest requirements. The price seemed amazingly low considering the claims made. I bought one and am so glad I did.
I initially struggled with the manual and made great use of the WWW to seek help from really helpful Boss users worldwide. You can record straight out of the box but I did have a few problems when trying to bounce (e.g merge tracks 1-4 to free up 3 tracks) and master prior to converting to WAV/MP3. It's mostly a problem understanding the terminology and how certain functions work, once you get over a few hurdles it becomes second nature and you are rewarded for sticking with it.
I have to say this is just about the best musical tool I have owned in my life. The only limitations are your imagination. It fits in your shirt pocket, you can walk around your garden recording as you go if you get the urge, my Mrs is getting worried as I spend more time with it than with her! I have used it mainly for guitar based rock/pop but have plugged in a keyboard and also experimented with bouncing tracks to make some fun acapella sounds. The sound quality is exceptional in my opinion including using the on board mic and the drum machine is pretty good as well and allows you to construct your own rhythm from the loops rather than just using the loops as they are. I use re-chargeable batteries and these last for several hours, just keep a couple spare.
It's happy having your own stomp-boxes etc plugged in if you need some extra sounds. If you need a gadget to put down your musical sketches as well as providing a bunch of tools to polish your efforts in the comfort of your own sofa, I highly recommend the Micro. Enjoy.
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50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dead handy, some limitations, 2 Nov 2007
This is a clever little gadget. It is a portable audio recorder, an effects box, a dictation machine, an MP3 player, and a pocket mirror (no joke - the fascia is very reflective). You can even use it as a guitar tuner, and as a very simple drum machine. I think Boss was trying to make a convergent device, and they have almost succeeded, especially for the price. Nonetheless the Micro BR has a couple of quite major flaws that hold it back. If you think of it as a portable effects box with a built-in solid state recorder it's excellent. If you need to record people speaking it's very useful, and small, and silent as it records. It is actually cheaper that some digital dictation machines, and will record voice forever with a 1gb SD card, although the batteries will run down after a couple of hours. It's not so good as a replacement for a four-track tape recorder, however, for reasons I will explain. I have owned one for about six months and I still use it every so often, mainly as a guitar pre-amp and effects box.
The interface takes a while to pick up, and the manual is not great. It comes in an excellent box. You get a felt-feeling slipcase, two alkaline batteries, and a 128mb memory card that has a demo song on it. There's an erratum slip for the manual. The demo song is a bland rock song. The manual does not say if it was recorded from scratch with the Micro BR; I imagine that it was not.
The first and most important limitation is that you can only record from one input at a time. The machine has four inputs. There is a 1/4 inch guitar jack socket, there is a built-in microphone, and there is a 2.5mm socket that doubles as a line input and a powered mic input. If you want to record yourself playing guitar through the 1/4 jack onto track one, and singing into a microphone plugged into the 2.5mm microphone socket at the same time, you can't. There is an option to combine the inputs of the 1/4 jack and the built-in microphone, but this is not proper multi-track recording, because the resulting sound is automatically mixed together onto a single track. Once you have recorded this guitar and voice combination, you will be unable to split the two elements apart or edit their relative levels. With my old four-track portastudio I could record guitar to track one, mic to track two, stereo synth to tracks three and four, all at the same time. With the Micro BR you cannot do this. The Micro BR is therefore not a proper replacement for an old four-track cassette portastudio with built-in mixer. It plays back four tracks, as per the product description, but it's not technically a four-track recorder. You can record the LINE and EXT microphone onto a stereo pair, so perhaps you could use this to mock up two-track mono recording, although I haven't tried it. The inputs will record onto two tracks with the stereo ping-pong delay, in which case you get a mono audio input with a stereo delay effect.
There's nothing to stop you from recording guitar and vocal separately, but this isn't as immediate. The interface is big on specific sequences of the record and play and track buttons, and I tend to use it purely as a jotting pad, editing the sound on my PC later on. The Micro BR has a range of punch-in, copy and paste etc editing functions but they would be aggravating to use with such an interface.
Connecting it to a PC is a mixture of good and bad. There's no installation software CD because Windows XP identifies the BR straight away. You can copy the multi-track song across to your PC, although it is stored in the BR's internal format. If you want to edit your work on the PC you'll have to either master it on the BR and send it to your PC, or use a piece of software called "BR Series Wave Converter" which is buried away on Roland's US website. In practice I have used this. It turns the BR's internal data into separate .wav tracks. In theory I could uploaded the edited data back into the BR, perhaps if I was busking and needed a backing track, although I have not tried this.
The built-in microphone is another limitation, assuming you are not just treating it as a free bonus. It's better than I expected, but it's not very sensitive, and it's noisy. The noise has an unpleasant digital sound to it, as if it was picking up the sound of a television on standby. There is a noise gate effect that mutes an input once the sound falls below a certain volume, but this creates an unpleasant "pumping" sensation as the noise rises and falls, and it is useless if you are recording sustained notes. With the input level turned up, and the microphone sensitivity turned up, the internal microphone would be useful if you were interviewing someone in a fairly quiet location. I would not rely on it in a noisy pub.
I used a Sony ECM-DS70P mini-microphone with the EXT input. It's better than the internal microphone - the signal is louder and the noise does not have the same electronic sound. It's still not good enough for recording e.g. birdsong. I can't really evaluate the EXT input because I would need a very expensive noise-free microphone. If I select EXT with nothing plugged into the machine, there is quite a high noise level, whereas the guitar and line inputs are almost silent.
The effects are useful, but fiddly. There is a reverb unit, and a multi-effects unit. The effects are arranged so that the reverb is global, accessed from the "input" mention, and the multi-effects are clumped into groups per input. If you select the GTR input you get a certain set of multi-effects (speaker and amp simulations, chorus, flanger, tremolo), and if you select the MIC input you get another set of multi-effects (compressor, noise suppressor, delay, and EQ). If you select the LINE or EXT microphone inputs, you only get a compressor/limiter. At least, it seems like this at first. I have found, by fiddling with the menu, that you can apply any effect to any input, something which the manual does not mention. The amp and speaker simulators sound pretty good, and there's a nice METAL preset. The manual is poor, and has some errors. There is a correction sheet with the manual, but this still leaves out at least one mistake (you select the guitar tuner by pressing EFFECTS and RHYTHM, as written on the front of the BR, rather than EFFECTS and UTILITY).
There is a built-in drum machine. There are hundreds of patterns, including fills, lead-ins, variations etc, but you can't edit them, or mute parts. Artistically, most of them are on the level of a home keyboard, with three or four gems. You can play the patterns with several drum kits, although I believe there are only four fundamental drum sounds in each kit (bass, snare, hat and cymbal). Most of the kits sound the same, and are not great. The one exception to this rule is the 808 kit, which is very good, with a big bouncy kick drum. You can apply the global reverb to the rhythm track, but not the other effects, e.g. no phaser, distortion etc. There are some metronome beeps at the end of the drum preset list. Think of the drum machine as an overgrown metronome.
In its default state, after setting up a new song, the machine applies a dab of reverb and turns on the first multi-effects patch, which is a chorus effect. If you want a dry recording from scratch you have to click through the menus and turn the effects off, including the input reverb. This is a bit of a bore.
All in all the Micro BR is useful if you work around its limitations. It's not really a replacement for a four-track tape recorder. If you want to edit your work into a song you would be much better off using a PC, and it a shame that the BR doesn't interface seamlessly with a computer. It would be great if you could hook it up via USB, perhaps with some PC software to control the BR's functions and carry out edits. Think of the BR as a guitar effects box that can record audio, or a battery-powered roving recording unit. If you want to practice guitar silently, and perhaps jot down some riffs, perhaps even work on a simple arrangement, it's good fun. You can download MP3 files into it, and play them back, and play along with them using the BR's effect, which might be a godsend if you're a busker. Bear in mind that you cannot play and sing along at the same time through the BR however.
At this price it's hard to really knock it. It's cheaper than the nearest obvious competitor, the Zoom H4 (which seems to be aimed at microphonists, whereas the Boss BR is aimed at guitarists), and as I have said it's cheaper than many plain digital dictation machines.
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