Zoom R8

ZOOM R8

The zoom R8 was exactly what I needed..easy to use..sound is great .. to be ablecto capture those moments quickly and in great quality really helps

Having great fun with this 8 track

Easy to understand instructions - and pretty much plug in and play !!

Overall, excellent

The machine itself is cool. It's intuitive with a little messing around, but there's one major kicker. It comes with a full version of Cubase Le12, which can't find the drivers as an audio interface. The sound from playback will only come through the surface pro and not through my studio monitors or headphones. It can be used as a midi controller, which is cool, but i'd rather have my reference monitors than manual faders.

Overall, the unit itself is well worth the money, but lads, if your giving something with it for free, make sure it works.

Deadly little thing!

Reminded me of the old Tascam 4 tracks. Neat, tidy design. Very functional and onboard effects pretty good. The built-in drum machine, once you get used to it, is very handy.

I recorded an entire lockdown album on this- admittedly using a Pod XT Pro for effects but very happy with the results.

Intuitive

Poorly intuitive and need to read the instructions.

I still haven't found a way to transfer the recording to a computer,

It’s all there

As a singer songwriter playing acoustic stuff this is really just the job . Simple and good quality.

Makes music out of you!

Excellent little recorder that does it all and very well. It completely replaced my computer daw, I now use it very rarely if I want to manipulate quickly the already recorded tracks. The manual is quite a reading but after finishing it, I had a complete song in a couple of hours just from a simple idea. And when I say complete song I mean it had everything, guitar tracks, bass, drums, vocals, backing vocals and it was all Mastered! My bandmates were stoned! I also use it to record my bands rehearsals, it does it with the usual excellent Zoom quality, of course not so specialized as a Zoom H6 we have! A disadvantage I found is when you want to cut n paste and manipulate a track, its much more difficult than from a daw and the turning wheel takes forever to go from the start to the end of the song, and there is no shortcut! But unlike other similar products, this one records everything in wav format, so you can immediately export them and use them as you like.

All an all is a fantastic product that really inspires me to write music and share it with my band! I totally love it!

Great multi-tool

The fact that it can both serve as control surface and external audio interface for your DAW or just be a stand-alone multi-track recorder is really what makes this a great tool for me. Sometimes I just want to record stuff and I don't care to be near a computer or think too much about it. With the R8 I just power it and start recording, it makes me a lot more productive than having to fire up a DAW, hook up cables, pre-amps and stuff — by the time I'm done with all that all inspiration and creativity has left my body.

Most basic operations are pretty straight-forward but some things are well hidden behind several obscure layers of menus—especially when it comes to sampling/sequencing and such. UX-wise this certainly isn't a master piece but it's adequate.

The quality of the built-in effects is about what you'd expect, but I don't really see why it needs any effects at all. I figure most people that use this will be doing post-processing in a DAW anyway in which case they probably already have their favorite effects and presets there.

You CAN do some rudimentary sampling/sequencing with it, but I personally only use it as a fancy metronome and then do real beats later. If that's an important factor for you, then I think you should look for a different device because it's not where the focus of this one lies.

Great recording device

I was frustrated with recording into pro tools and watching the screen as I played (very distracting for me) , then jumping into editing and mixing too early in the process so I got this device solely to record my tracks and ingest later into DAW for mix/edit. It is perfect for that role. The machine is very easy to use, weighs very little and there are tons of features built in that I will probably never use but many others will, such as using it as a control surface and the rhythm tracks etc. I mostly use a small preamp and compressor on the way in but I have also found that recording directly in works well when I want to put some sketch ideas down very quickly.

Lovely bit of kit

Take it with me all over the place and use it in the home studio as a sketch pad for ideas. Works fine with 'Audition' - in build condensers are better than I expected.