Thank you for your review of portable recorders in your September issue. As a songwriter using guest artists on demos, I would like to have a portable digital recorder to go remote. I thought I was getting that capability with my Digitech GNX-4 Workstation. However, its recording finesse comes up short because it does not support maneuvering around and punching in and out within a track. This is a hardship on those artists who takes are less than perfect.

With the overdub feature, the Tascam DR-1 appears to be the songwriters dream machine. However, it does not offer punch-in and punch-out recording either and, as your review pointed out, a high impedance instrument input.

Can you give me any gear ideas short of putting my recording software on a laptop and carrying all of the input paraphernalia?