24 tracks on iPhone 4S

[tawalker]

First post I've been using MDAW for a few months now (first with a 4th-gen iPod Touch, then with my current iPhone 4S), and some of my MDAW recordings can be heard on my most recent Bandcamp albums ("Homecooked" and the two "50-90-2012" volumes). I record with a TASCAM iU2 and iM2, and it's great having a digital audio/MIDI recording setup which will fit in a small bag (or in the iPhone's case: in my pocket ).

I've been wondering about upgrading MDAW (via IAP) from 8- to 24-track, but I would want to have an idea first, of how people think the iPhone 4S might cope with that many tracks. I wouldn't be recording more than two or three tracks simultaneously, but wouldn't the 4S struggle playing back so many sound sources, especially if I was recording an instrument via Audiobus at the same time? (Eight tracks have been no problem at all, but 16+?)

Also: the only upgrade I can find in MDAW is 8- to 24-track. My memory might be at fault, but wasn't there an 8- to 16-track option?

Thanks for a really great app, and please feel free to check out my recordings at Bandcamp. Those from the last year or so were recorded almost entirely on the iPhone or iPod Touch, using MDAW and Garageband (albeit mixed and "buffed up" in Logic Pro on the Mac). Enjoy

Many thanks,
Tim.

[pwnified]

MultiTrack will work fine with 24 tracks, on any device. It does this by using a super secret ninja trick to cache all the tracks, yet still provide random access to any and all of the individual tracks. It's similar to a "freeze track" function of most DAW's, but it's really just a single cache which contains all the tracks in one. The tradeoff for this functionality, is that projects that use more than 8 tracks, use a bunch of extra filespace for the cache but still much less filespace than if each track had a separate freeze track. So you shouldn't have any problem as long as you keep lots of extra filespace on your device. MultiTrack is actually more efficient when songs have more than 8 tracks.

The cache track will be created as soon as you add track number 9. And it should tell you if there isn't enough space to add the track. Mostly, this caching system is transparent to the user, the only thing is sometimes a message will pop up (Optimizing) only when adding track number 9, or when rebuilding the cache when opening a song after iOS deletes it when space gets to low.

[tawalker]

Thanks for explaining this - I'm already finding eight tracks can be a bit of a "squash" on some recordings of mine, so I may well be hitting the "upgrade me" button in MDAW before too long

Thanks too for making a great multitrack recorder; I've used all sorts of hardware and software multitracks over the last twenty years (from the TASCAM 424mkII to Logic Pro), and MDAW has to be the one which I find easiest to just "plug in and go". Keep up the good work!

Tim