There are a number of excellent features to the Tascam Pocketstudio 5. The size, for one, is a major selling point - it is indeed very light and portable. The digital recordings are clean, and the EQ and reverb work really well. Believe it or not, the mic on the included headset delivers a surprisingly decent signal, and the headphones sound fine, and are very comfortable.

Tascam has to know that this four-track recorder is competing against some pretty serious laptop-oriented software that is on the market nowadays, software which delivers master-quality audio for an increasingly modest cost. But if your main goal is producing MP3’s to put up on the Internet, you will not have a problem with the Pocketstudio.

The only way to extract actual audio from the unit is via a 1/8-in jack. Certainly you could then use an audio-oriented burner to make CD’s from that, or you can use the USB port on the Pocketstudio to dump MP3’s to your computer, and burn them from there. However, sending the files from the Pocketstudio to my computer produced some surprises for me and caused me to learn some new things about my laptop’s software. I will discuss that more at the end of this article.

I normally write songs at home on an acoustic guitar, and then go to a friend’s to record them, adding other instruments on his multitrack computer setup with Digital Performer, and for a very reasonable price. I never enjoyed any company’s four-track cassette recorders because I have worked in professional multitrack studios where things are, of necessity, basically linear and flexible. I wish the Pocketstudio offered four audio outs that could be used to dump the four tracks to another medium, and keep working with them.

I knew that I would probably not be able to record on all four tracks at once, but when I saw two mic inputs, I figured I could at least run both of those at once, and record, for example, acoustic guitar and vocal simultaneously. However, you can only arm one track at a time.

Also, the mic inputs can only be assigned to the third and fourth tracks, and the line inputs only to the first two. I believe that you could bounce them internally to the other tracks, after recording them, but I am unsure why there is a limitation in the first place. Just to be the devil’s advocate, what if you are an acapella artist, who wants to record four tracks of vocals, or an instrumentalist who is aiming for an all-guitar recording?

But, all that aside, I decided to see what I could come up with in one night, with minimal reference to the manual. There is a song I wrote a number of years ago that I had been fooling around with new intro figures for, on my bass, for the past couple of months.

In terms of telling you how to operate the Pocketstudio, the manual does not do a bad job. I was able to navigate the functions with only a few false starts. The combination of a thumbwheel, a center button, a four-way rocking switch, and simple controls for paging ahead and back, and from the song to the menu, are pretty easy to get used to. Pressing the center button and holding it causes the display screen’s backlight to come on and stay on, which is good, but illuminating the transport keys would have been a great bonus.

There are places to name or delete your MP3 mixes, to load and edit songs, and also to check the remaining memory on the 32 MB Compact Flash card that stores your musical info. There is also an excellent function called “Card Optimize” that can gain you a few extra MB by organizing the data files most efficiently.

A friend of mine who recommended that I check out the Pocketstudio 5 assured me that it had a drum machine. The good news is that it has a MIDI module, but the “sort of” bad news is that the files have four-part arrangements of songs to choose from in different genres.

A much less memory intensive idea would have been to provide a bunch of loops, those things that songwriters everywhere have been using more and more to write songs for at least the last decade. I do not understand the decision to provide full “band” tracks, unless it is so that lyricists who cannot play any instruments can write songs. I understand from the CD-ROM manual that the tracks other than drums can be stripped away, but I did not want to go to that much trouble. I just wanted to record my song!