Great for home recording and sharing your masterpieces on the web

This is great for the home studio and if you keep things basic, down to 4-tracks or less, you can come away with some very professional sounding recordings. There will always be the naysayer looking for the most pristine recordings, but this one will get you close with very little effort and at very low expense. This is great for folk or folk rock recordings. I use a pre-amp to capture vocal and condensor mic and run it through the line in. Although the mic on the unit works well too. Usually I record vocals and acoustic guitar at same time. I plug my electric guitar and bass into the guitar input for tracks 2&3. I haven't been able to figure out how to set up the drum machine the way I want, so I use various percussion gadgets on track 4. The mastering and mix down is very easy from there and you can convert your recording to a finished MP3 or WAV file. From there you can take the SD card, plug into your computer and upload your songs to your internet site, myspace, iTunes, etc. Again, very easy and low cost.

Great little digital 4-track!

I love this little thing! Easy to use! Really fun effects. Great little 4-Track. Powerful yet compact. The internal mic is nice, too. I use mine as a scratch pad. Be sure to buy a power supply! You'll be using it a ton!

Boss Micro BR

Pros:
Lots of stuff packed into one tiny unit. Basically a small studio. I used it for band practice. Plugged two tom drum mics into it via the stereo input and got great recordings. Great for the singer/songwriter. Great for layering tracks.

Cons: A bit of a learning curve, but not steep. Manuevering around it can be time consuming.

Overall:
Awesome gadget. I sold mine to buy a BR600. It worked very well for what I needed to do at the time. Recommend this to anyone.

Very easy to use

This little device is easy to use, and a valuable songwriting tool. You can lay down your basic ideas using the onboard metronome (also great for effective practice), and edit, add, subtract or move parts as you see fit. It's only four tracks, yes, but the 8 "V" tracks per track allow for some pretty lush recordings.

The manual could be better, but there is a vibrant online community and plenty of Youtube knowledge available on this thing. My son and his friends have even used it to write and record original songs.

Get the adapter though,this thing eats batteries.

About the Boss MICRO BR and mp3's-info that's missing from Reviews

I have owned one of these (and used it daily) for 2 years. The one thing I noticed in the Roland/Boss review and the Sweetwater comments is that the Boss Micro BR can playback MP3 files and upload them via USB. This is true, it can also slow them down and speed them up and isolate different parts. Example, you can isolate a guitar sound out of a track and then slow it down using the MP3 player. One thing not mentioned in any of these 'reviews', unless I missed it, is that you can also RECORD MP3's USING THE MICRO BR. Yes, realtime, record anything as a mp3 stereo or mono and adjust the sample rate/bits of it (clarity). The MP3 player is separate from the 4 track player and is only mono or stereo. Its a totally different unit in mp3 mode vs 4 track mode, which is great. Its like having two devices. Also, the 4 track does do 32 virtual tracks which is common on a lot of Boss recorders. It does this well. You also can record (by bouncing tracks) about 10 tracks separately and mix them down clearly. It has Rolands proprietery CSOM effects built in. These are amazing for a unit this size. Not only do you get presets for vocal, bass, guitar, etc..(digital effects) but the effects and effect chains themselves are editable. Its minimal editing, but amazing on a unit the size of a ipod and it really is that small. The regular large pic above is about the size of it(not the xlarge pic). The effects are editable and useable when doing each track, then there is a bounce down mode, and then the mastering mode. The effects are useable again and work really well in both the multitracking mode and the mastering mode. This thing blows away any cassette 4 track and is so good, I haven't used my digital Fostex 8 track since I got this Boss Micro Br. Its worth every penny. I just wish it was built tougher. After daily use (literally) for 2 years and dropping it a lot, mine has locked up. It may have got squashed. Tough enough, but thats plastic not titanium, if it were they wouldn't be so affordable. Best thing by Boss in years. SAM

Very useful compact recorder.

This is a great little recorder for getting ideas down fast. It's just what I needed for my song writing experiments. I have the ac adapter as well ,and that makes work easier . I don't have to worry about saving battery life and its environmentaly friendly. I'm using it for practacing as well. You record a bass track and get the drum machine going and let er rip. It takes awhile to learn all the features but it pays off in the end. Basic recording is very simple.One complaint is that the tempo setting doesn't get saved with the song. Am I doing something wrong? I've learned to work around this by making notes. The guitar sounds are good. There are lots of useful drum beats or just use the metronome. And there's a tuner. Haven't done the bouncing yet. The Mac is better for that sort of editing. Arranging drum tracks looks to complicated, its best to just set 1 groove and go. I recommend this highly. The Beatles recorded on 4 tracks and here you have it in the palm of your hand !!

Boss Micro BR

As a beginning guitarist, I had an interest in purchasing a recorder to use to save developing songs for family or download onto a computer for eventual editing. I purchased the micro for this purpose. Overall it will serve my purposes quite well. I read somewhere of someone complementing the box it came in.....I thought that was bit funny but in reality it somes in a well designed box that protects it quite well during shipping. Kudos to whatever engineer designed it. The time spent designing the packaging speaks well for Boss and probably the thought put into their products. The unit itself is small and manageable not too much larger than a ipod. It has easy to read display and accessible controls. I am not crazy about the mirror finish since it smudges easy. A case might help. I had a bunch of AA rechargeables but it does run through them quickly so I opted to order the ac adapter with the option of using the batteries if I needed mobility. I also opted to purchase a 1GB memory for it even though the 128 supplied is probably adequate for dealing with an hour of recording at a time. I also purchased a usb cord to eventually be able to download to my computers for editing and tweaking.
The manual is easy to read. Don't lose it since it takes a while to get a handle on multiple menus and toggles to get the most out of the recorder. I don't think there are pdf files available. Once using it for a bit it starts to come easier and more intuitively. I am still learning how to use the effects and rhythm functions to enhance my creations. The onboard mic seems pretty powerful, had to do one song over when playing my acoustic because of the clatter of my pup coming down the steps. I opted to buy a small powered condensor mic and pole to play my acoustic even though the onboard mic was probably ok. I can also plug my strat directly into the unit. I will get more effective with using this compact recorder as I use it more and study the manual. I have not learned to lay multiple tracks yet. Overall, I am impressed with this little recorder. It is perfect for my home recording uses.

Comfy and a real cutie

Eye candy for sure, but the tactility is another attraction for me.I haven't gotten into the finickiness of bouncing or mastering, [It's not particularly needed since I use several software packages which can breeze through the process intuitively.
Let me offer the image of a guitar player ...eyes closed... lazing back against his pillow, the recorder,weighing nothing to speak of, taking up less room than a paperback, signal fed from a chicken-plucked telly ...

And can I tell you how convenient it is to record in MP3 format by just pressing record-play-stop and repeating the process to capture another rendition or style of playing while resting assured that each piece has it's own number to call up later to offload for looping on Live 5 or Cubase?

Good device

There are some things they should fix, and it wouldn't really take much. They should make it possible to record both guitar and mic at the same time, as a previous reviewer pointed out. They should update the firmware and/or circuitry so you can use high-capacity SD cards. Not so much because 1G isn't enough, but becaue it's hard to find the 1G cards now.

Some of the criticisms aren't quite fair. You can find out how much space is left on the SD card (it's documented three times in the manual). In MP3 mode, press Utility | SNG [TR1] | INF [TR1] | Cursor right. Space left is shown in MB. In trainer mode, Utility | SNG [TR1] | INF [TR3] | Cursor right. Space left is shown in hours:minutes:seconds. As the manual documents, you can also see time remaining while you're recording: While not recording, press Utility and the cursor to indicate "Remain Info", press Value[+] to turn the setting on, press EXIT, then when you record it'll show remaining time while you record.

Two years ago I'd have given this 4.5 stars but the difficulty of finding the memory cards makes me think this device won't be useful for many years.

Lotsa Pros And Cons

I must say, a very "Pros and Cons" device. It is remarkably portable but is cumbersome to use. The effects and capabilities are vast, but it is difficult to know where you are in editing and in menus in general. It took me two sets of batteries to get somewhat comfortable with its navigation and deal with a song that was converted from an MP3 onto which I laid in a guitar track of mine. The Owners Manual is difficult to use; I was better off with a few hints from it, and then learning how by just doing. You do get about 3 hours of (alkaline) battery time if you set the Batt Save to 10 seconds (default is 30 secs for this display auto-dim feature). The guitar input effects are well done and sound good through the headphones, but they can't be used effectively outside the Micro BR, like into an amp---where they sounded terrible. If you have lots of time and lots of batteries to sit and edit with this unit (like on a 10-hour flight/bus ride) it may be worth it for you. Also I could not find a way (and this should be easy!) to determine how much memory is left; and it's all on the SD card. Mostly, it's just a really glorified MP3 player with an easy way to record/lay a track of guitar with good effects patches that are modifiable. I did not try the microphone input.ItemID: