I am a videographer first and a recording technician second. I've been trying to get better and easier to use equipment and software to record live bands (audio). My goal is to have a setup that can create great sounding audio to go with the video (isn't that the goal of any videographer?)
I first purchased a Roland 8 track (6 track record) recorder and got good results (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-T5XFzq8w8). But six channels is very limiting. And I found the solution difficult to manage and time consuming to export off the Roland and onto my computer for editing in Sonar.
So I purchased a Tascam 16 channel USB interface with 2 x 8 channel splitters so I could go directly into Sonar while getting direct input from the stage or from a snake before the signal was sent to the front of the house mixer. I got decent results, but the Tascam isn't so good to setup in a short time-frame - hardly any peaking indicators and such. Results from my first use weren't bad, but not great (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYappa5uYA)
I'm a small-time videographer who works with bands with low/no budget. Therefore, I can't afford a sound engineer to go with me on most gigs. I need a fire and forget multi-track recording setup. I'm ok at post-production as long as I can get good channel recordings to start with.
Any suggestions?