I dispensed with tape for these sessions, recording 8 tracks at 24-bit/88.2kHz to my Mac mini, backing up to the external hard drives you see on top of the rack on the left and to DVD-R at night. Main A/D converters were the FireWire-connected Metric Halo ULN-2 (left bottom) and MIO 2882 (under the LCD monitor), all word-clock slaved to a dCS 904 converter. Tracking software was the beta version of the MIO Console-X, which stores each mike channel as a mono SD2 file. This software also allowed me to send a mix of the mike outputs to the Benchmark DAC-1 (top left) for the producer and me to audition, which I also stored on an Alesis MasterLink (not shown). Final bit of hardware in the pic is a dbx mike pre, used with a powered speaker out in the hall to allow the producer to talk to the singers. I place this speaker way to the side of the hall, BTW, so I always have an instant channel check when I "roll tape," er, "hard drive."

I came away from the 4 days of sessions with 80GB of data, the mixing and editing of which will occupy my winter evenings.