Tascam Dp 004 Portable Recorder

Tascam DP-004 Digital 4-Track Recorder

I needed a very small, handy, good quality 4 track as a go anywhere songwriting tool. It was a toss up between the Boss Micro BR and Tascam DP 004 so I tried them both. Whilst the Boss is an amazing feat of engineering and features things the Tascam does not, such as built in drum machine, effects, virtual tracks and eq I found it to be aimed more at guitarists or indie bands wishing to either practice or make cheap demos. Not knocking it as it is a great little unit but the Tascam is way simpler to use and features higher quality audio. I would say the Boss is more suited to younger musicians who don't mind fiddling/squinting at menus whilst the Tascam is probably aimed at the pro songwriter who wishes to add a quality device to his/her toolkit.

The DP004 is a very simple, straightforward terrific quality palm sized 4 tracks studio that really speeds the songwriting process. The fact you can import/export CD quality WAV files to your computer (which you cannot do with the Boss) makes it way more useful to me. I should point out that it does not have built in eq or effects but for me the whole 'less is more' principle really helps me focus in on the craft of my songwriting without the distraction of too many options. I can worry about the garnish and the fairy dust after I've exported the WAV files into my DAW.

I was looking for a little recorder that i could use and bring to band rehearsals so that i could analyse them better and also do a little 4-track recording. I found this online and thought the price was reasonable, it looked great and the size was perfect so i bought it.

When it arrived I couldn't have been happier, this is one serious little bad boy. Its so easy to use and the sound quality is perfect, I've even hooked it up to the PA system in the bar i regularly play in and the sound was immense.

I also use it to create musical sketches, recording little snippets and melodies that come into my head. Recording four-tracks and bouncing them down to record more tracks is so straight forward. I've never used anything more complicated than a walkman in the past, I'd always get help from friends to record stuff, but this little gadget is so easy and simple to use. You can literally take it ith you whereever you go and record anything!

If there are any negative points i would say i can't believe it doesn't come with a charger, and the one they recommend you to buy costs £20-30 as its their own brand. Alternatively you can just do like me and use a PSP charger as its exactly the same and you can pick up one of these for a fraction of the price. Also there aren't many features like sound effects or adjusting things, but that suits me fine.

So i'm giving this 5-star because i love it so much and all my musician mates want to steal it from me.

This is a good quality recorder. I used it, a day after receiving it, to record our band practising, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the result (the recording, not the musicianship). Two external mics nicely spaced for a good stereo image. Worked a treat.

There's no point in me reiterating the praise others have heaped on it, all of which I agree with. So, here are some flaws.

There are no mute buttons for playback. You can mute a track by turning its level down, but that's not ideal because you have to remember where the level was so you can return it there. And it isn't instantaneous.

Another is that there is no backlight on the display, and it can be difficult to read if the light is not ideal.

No mains PSU is provided but it will take the kind of 5v PSU everyone has lying around from some redundant piece of kit or other (a pocket minidisk player in my case) so hold off shelling out for the TASCAM version.

Punching-in is fine if you are a singer or have a mate handy, but if you play an instrument and you're on your own you need a hand free to push a button and that's far from ideal.

Given the price and the real purpose of this - as a basic recorder with some nevertheless useful features - these are minor gripes.

A major gripe though is the means of exporting your recordings. It records in TASCAM's proprietary format, so to get at your creation on standard kit such as a PC, you have to go through a 2-step process - first you Export it as WAV to a separate partition on the memory card, and then copy from there to your PC. There are two ways to do this - you can create a stereo master and then export that, or export the individual tracks and master them elsewhere. Mastering on the DP004 means playing the whole song, so it will take 3 minutes for a 3 minute song (duh!), then about another 3 mins to export the master as a WAV (to the second partition) then some time to copy to your PC. Reckon on the lions share of 10 mins to do all that for a 3 minute song. I recorded 26 songs at our practice, so that's almost four and a half hours of work to get it all off if I master first.

Alternatively, you can export the individual tracks and master them on your PC. Unfortunately, although you can export up to 4 tracks from a song in a single operation, you can only export one song at a time because the WAV files created from the tracks are given default names Track001.WAV, Track002.WAV, etc. and you can't change them. If you export the tracks for Song 1 then try to export the tracks for Song 2 it will find that Track001.WAV (etc.) already exists on the second partition, so you'll overwrite the exported Song 1 if you continue. To get round it, you have to:

- export the tracks for Song 1
- connect the USB cable (disabling all other functions on the DP004 in the process)
- move the exported tracks to your PC
- disconnect the USB cable (automatically rebooting the DP004 in the process)
- repeat all that for each of your other songs

Tedious, but quicker than mastering first.

Confusing, or what?

I've scoured the manual and there seems to be nothing there about globally exporting everything from the card in one fell swoop. I don't care about the time it takes, it's all the button pressing and the confusion in keeping track (pardon the pun) of where I'm up to that's the problem. If I've been a numpty and missed something obvious then please, someone, put me out of my misery...

Anyway, that said, it's still a great piece of kit and I don't regret buying it.

It loses one star because of the ridiculously complicated export mechanism. But only one.

Read other reviews on the Amazon USA website.