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I understand your fear of tape. I did a remote outdoors in the Carribean with an iBook and MOTU 828. I borrowed an MX2424 as a backup, which proved to be unnecessary. BTW, there is a way to *trick* the MX2424 into behaving like a tape machine. You set up a song that is longer than the concert and record blank audio from top to bottom. When you get to your remote, you will be doing an overdub, recording over the blank audio, so if you lose power (the nightmare of the live show), the MX2424 retains everything you've already recorded, just like a tape machine.
This would be a great feature for Logic or Pro Tools.
Also, tape has more *environmental* limitations (heat, humidity) than a hard disk. Tape might have been nasty in the tropics. Alesis used to tell me they could plot the course of a storm across the country as humidity related calls came into the service department!
A laptop shouldn't care if it loses ac power, although the audio interface won't be happy. Computer crashes are more to be feared, but if you have done your homework (do a few test sessions to find out if it crashes and what the causes are), you should be fine.
I have a Mini-Me (with USB option) and a laptop - sounds and works great for stereo location recording. Mic pres very clean, soft limit / compression can be transparent or ridiculous. Very easy (in Mac OSX), portable, tiny, and fast. Just recently used it as an auxilliary studio when I mistakenly started a full ("general use" instead of "multimedia") Speed Disk optimization on my 200 gig audio drive (3 hours plus!). Singer showed up and we used the mini rig to great result. Only bummer is 48k limitation of USB. Firewire option coming. For 8 channel remote sessions, I can borrow any number of firewire interfaces until the Firewire cards for the Rosetta 800 come out.
For cheaper, the MBox isn't bad. Did a jazz location recording with 2 ribbon mics that came out fine, a few vo sessions. Won't touch the Mini-Me though....H
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