…(awesome) lap-sized 8 track recorder…!
[ 2025 update ] Believe it or not I am still using this box as my primary audio interface to my Windows 10 audio production system. It turned out that some of the buttons were actually wearing out. An electronics wizard friend of mine found the same buttons for sale on ebay and actually did the rework to fix it.
But I depend so much on the unit that I searched for either new old stock, or a nice used unit to keep as a backup. I found one from a Japanese seller, which I bought. It turns out to be in beautiful condition, and has a serial number in the 60,000s, e,g, about 30,000 higher than my previous one; e.g. quite a bit newer.
So that will be my third one. I broke the first one because I took it with me on many business trips, and finally dropped it one too many times.
Incidentally, I looked very carefully at the Zoom R12. announced in 2022, which is supposedly meant to replace to R8. After researching its features and reviews on the Web, I determined that I couldn’t use it.
Notes on 1.17 firmware upgrade – problem and solution
[ 2025-03-01 ] After I don’t know how many years, Zoom has put up a new version of the R8 firmware on their support websites. The original version was 1.00, and a 1.02 patch was released long ago. (1.02 fixed an occasional problem where the mode where the R8 memory was a USB device didn’t always work right.)
When I first upgraded one of my units to 1.17, I found that the audio interface function was totally broken on my Windows 10 machine. In all applications, attempting to use the R8 audio interface would fail as follows: when playing audio, for some seconds it would play correctly, then the audio quality would degrade to an unusable degree. Nothing I tried could fix that, and unfortunately I could find nowhere on the internet where there was 1.00 or 1.02 firmware to downgrade to.
I finally got in contact with Zoom support in Japan. The helpful advice they gave me was to make sure the Windows Zoom audio driver was also upgraded to the version that was included with the new firmware (this is 2.6.0.11 I think).
This solved my problem and I can now use the R8 with any applications – Ableton Live, Reaper, Sound Forge, Izotope Ozone, VLC player, you name it. Incidentally, I still use ASIO4ALL for my ASIO wrapper (as I have been for what must be 10 years.
[ 2019 notes ] I’m updating this to add a few more comments. I’ve owned this since at least 2013 and maybe before. I see from a quick web search that this is still available which should immediately tell you something in this day of advancing technology.
See the outstanding review with photos by Rich Menga; a good takeaway is that he makes this comment, which I fully agree with:
I’m very surprised anyone who records at home doesn’t own an R8.
For various reasons I wanted something very small and portable I could use as a songwriting/scratch pad. I looked at several from Boss and Tascam but settled on this unit. It can actually be battery powered with AA batteries (!); and even supports rechargeable AAs (!!) (see more on this below).
The recording medium is an SDHC card. It ships with a 2 GB card containing a lot of excellent drum loops, but you can install up to a 32 GB card, which I highly recommend, particularly as they are sub-$10 at this point. I copied the loops to the larger card and there is tons on room now for projects and takes. If somehow you fill up a card just put in a new one…but I’d be surprised if you did.
Two tiny condenser mics are built right into the device. They’re obviously not ultra high quality but fine for recording acoustic instruments/vocals.
The audio effects and processing options are very good. In particular, the guitar effects are great for me. With an electric or acoustic guitar, or a piano and your voice you can create really good tracks. There’s plenty of processing options for vox, bass, special effects, eq.
I cannot recommend this more highly! One of the things I’m finding out is that I’m more likely to record a passing idea when I can boot this up in 15 seconds, plug in my guitar or sing (or even take a voice note!) into it. You don’t even need to set up mics, but can play an acoustic instrument or sing right into the built in mics! Later on when the whole studio is booted I can easily transfer the audio files to Reaper or Live.
The included loops and rhythm patterns are surprisingly good. Not only that, but if you have a collection of your favorite loops, you can use your computer to copy them to the R8 and use them just as you can with the supplied ones! Of course they have to be 44.1k WAVs, but plenty of those fit on the 32 GB SD card.
Real guitar players have dissed the R8’s built in guitar effects, but for my money I never use my Pod or Korg Pandora. I never play live so for my needs the built-in effects are outstanding. Not to mention the bass, clean channel, mic channel and mastering effects. (Full disclosure: once I got Native Instruments Guitar Rig 5 I use that for everything; I can even track guitar parts with it and my computer is not that recent or fast.)
Long digression about the R8 audio interface capabilities
Due to the demise of my Windows 7 computer, around 2019, I was forced to buy a completely new one. I wanted to keep running Win 7, but new computers no longer support old PCI cards, thus my beloved m-Audio Audiophile 2496 was no longer usable. I was sort of forced into Windows 10.
The built-in audio in the supposed great motherboard was shockingly bad: at high volumes. There was an audible continual background noise, and when certain CPU operations occur or you use a mouse, you can hear a zipping or tearing noise in the audio.
So I thought, no problem, I’ll just buy a simple PCIe audio card. That’s when I found out that basically there were no cheap PCIe audio cards. My salesman at Sweetwater, bless his soul, pointed out “hey, you have your Zoom R8 right? you can use it as a USB audio interface.” Well, slap my fro…I’ve had the thing all these years and never thought of that..
It turned out that it worked excellently and seems to sound quite good…so: problem solved, with equipment I already had! And I can still play the guitar into it, into my DAW and guitar plug ins, and monitor at the same time.
OK: returning to the original content in this review:
- The display is bright enough to actually see!
Yes, some of its functions can cumbersome to access (e.g. trim audio files) but for its size you just can’t beat it. Really, even though Zoom has released some newer and larger versions of these recorders, for my needs none of them are really as good as this one. I was looking at the R16 but I really have no need for 8 track simultaneous recording. The R16 uses 6 batteries too, and doesn’t have the rhythm unit that the R8 and R16 does.
Maybe it’s just my own personal taste, but I demoted my Line6 PodXT off my desktop (and onto ebay, sayonara) and only use the Zoom to record guitar tracks into my computer. Sometimes I’ll use NI Guitar Rig to punch up the processing. The nice thing is that you can record your guitar lead dry while monitoring effects, and bounce the effected part to another track. Then you can import the clean and FX track into your DAW, and add further effects.
- Battery powered!
Using 4 AA alkaline batteries you can get up to 5 hours of use, per the manual. But I am using 2500 mAh NiMH, which give at least 2 hours and more likely 3 or more depending on what you’re doing. (I’m going to actually measure this and will update the page when I do.)
Quick Pros and Cons list: based on my usage, YMMV of course!
The Amazon “From the manufacturer” section is informative and accurate. Not going to link to them for free though! Like they need any more money to add to their $trillions.
Pros:
- Small and extremely light (257 mm × 190 mm × 51 mm, 780 gm) – not sure if that’s with the batteries or not
- Boots up in a few seconds
- Bright backlight
- Built in stereo mics (tiny electret condensers at the front left and right corners of the unit)
- 2x XLR inputs in the back
- 24V/48V phantom power (you should probably be using USB power in this case)
- USB 2.0; files transfer to computer pretty quickly
- Usable FX
- Simple sample feature
- Simple drum machine feature with hundreds of usable patterns included
- Up to 32 GB SDHC cards supported
- Some of the supplied audio loops are pretty cool (I mean, how impossible is it to make everything thrilled with all the musical styles that are out there)
- Quick control surface capability
- I love this, I can quickly assign a couple faders to some of my Ableton controls if I decide I need to do some tweaking
- Good audio interface (see above)
Cons: a lot of these are pretty trivial, but just to let you know:
- This is not a cheap item. Pretty much everywhere will charge you USD299 for it. Still cheaper than any of the interface cards I looked at.)
- Some functions like bouncing and file trim/split are a little arcane, but with some dedicated reading of the manual supplemented with YouTube lessons you can easily learn it
- You can only record two audio channels at a time
- Be careful; if you are wedded to 48kHz you can’t record with FX at that SR
- It will lose the date and time if the batteries fail and you don’t replace them or hook to USB power within a few minutes. (It’s not a big deal to reset the date/time). If you don’t reset the time then new files will have wrong timestamps; I don’t know if there are any other gotchas.
- Renaming files is cumbersome using the jog wheel/cursor
- Supplied SD card is only 2GB; about half of it is supplied loops and drum patterns.
- Setting loop timing on fx comes up in ms; but Rich Menga in his review above shows how to get to the musical tempo setting
I was worried what I was going to do if Zoom discontinued this (which they did) and mine finally died (which it was in the process of doing). It turned out that the internet saved the day, once again.
Last modified 21 Mar 2025
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