Some years ago, "home-recording" meant song produce using Multi Track Recorders. In brief, Multi Track Recorders are tape recorders with plural tracks, for example, 4-tracks and 8-tracks. (Standard tape recorders have 2 tracks.) Recently, hard disc recorders, digital multi track recorders, are popular for "home-recording". Hard disc recorder looks like mixers at music studios and has built-in recording functions. We see various kinds of hard disc recorders and Roland VS series are popular. VS-1680 has 16 tracks and plenty of effects so that they're available for professional use. Depending on manufacturers, hard disc recorders have various characteristic. For example, Roland's are famous for plenty of effects and easy-operation. AKAI's don't have sound compression so most of their products keep high quality sound compared with others. When you buy a hard disc recorder, you should consider sound quality, numbers of effect, size and portablity. Recently, PC software with those hard disc functions are available. Some sequence software can synchronize MIDI with WAV and record them as well as hard disc recorders. If you have a high quality processor (Pentium||| 450MHz or so), worth considering to purchase these software.

Above hard disc recorders can create high quality demo tapes of band activities and private use. Those recorded sounds can be played only by that hard disc players, so they are required to mixed down to music tapes, DAT, MDs, CDs, etc. Each media has both merits and demerits. Considering the sound quality and portablity, CDs are the most appropriate as final media. When creating CDs, connects CD ROM Writer to PC which costs about USD.30-40, and Media (brank CDs, called CD-R) costs about USD.2.- (Some CD Writers including Roland VS series requires exclusive ones.) I have seen indies' CDs produced by CD ROM Writer, and think it's useful because of its low cost, however, some of those production cannot be perfectly played with all kinds of CD players, for example, car audios.