Portable recorder recommendations?

[guitrr]

I am looking for a small, inexpensive multi track recorder. It should be easily transferable to PC, (and hence to CD),simple to use, be reasonably capable, and portable. I am looking so far at the Fostex MR-8, and the Tone Works Pandora PXR4, both around $300.
This will be used for jotting down song ideas and putting them together, and perhaps for putting together some informal demos to use for gig prospects.
I'm a total novice with recording, so any advice would be most appreciated.

Kane

[San]

I used to have a zoom PS-04 (I think that's what it was called). It is a palm sized four track digital recorder. Very cool with loads of features including programmable drum and bass backing, tuner and loads of Zoom guitar effects. I really liked it and the quality was probably good enough for recording a demo but ultimately I got tired of the 'fiddlyness' of it and decided to upgrade to a full PC solution.

Hope this helps a bit!

San.

[guitrr]

I used to have a zoom PS-04 (I think that's what it was called). It is a palm sized four track digital recorder. Very cool with loads of features including programmable drum and bass backing, tuner and loads of Zoom guitar effects. I really liked it and the quality was probably good enough for recording a demo but ultimately I got tired of the 'fiddlyness' of it and decided to upgrade to a full PC solution.
Hmmm, a full PC solution... Like what? Is that a viable alternative?

Thanks,

Kane

[San]

Hmmm, a full PC solution... Like what? Is that a viable alternative?

Thanks,

Kane
It's not very portable but it does give you more or less studio quality and is very upgradeable. I use my 'regular' PC (900Mhz AMD with 256MB RAM) with a Creative Labs Audigy 2 sound card for the recording. This has worked great for medium quality recordings (16 bit/48k) but the Audigy can record at up to 24bit/192k and I'd like to take advantage of that so I'll probably be ugrading the motherbaord, CPU and RAM sometime soon.

The great thing about using your PC is that you can customise it to your needs rather than trying to work around a fixed interface in a gizmo like the PS-04.

I hope this helps a bit, feel free to ask any questions you like if you need more info on the PC recording stuff.

San.