Yet another idea based around the AKAI DR4d HDD recorders is to use them as
backing track alternators for studio jam applications, or even live performances. While
probably not its intended use, I see advantages in the approach of treating each
recordable track as an individual song template - the playback reliability and quality
is essentially perfect, the only issue I've detected is syncing innaccuracies whenever
tracks are being played simultaneously, like the unit was designed to do. My attraction
to the unit comes down to a few key things; the number of total tracks across my two
units amounts to eight, which is realistically a good number of songs to concern
yourself with working on at any given time. Its accomodating for plenty of runtime,
perhaps slightly more than most would volunteer to digest your crap - it actually is
close to that permissable by most live show timeslots - 30-40 mins, ~8 songs. You
typically see releases with this number of total tracks categorized as EPs, and considering
the irrelevance of 'LP', 'EP' and other labels in todays world apart from singles, its
not that important of a dilemma to concern yourself with; although you can inadvertently
handicap your product depending on which you pick. Some listeners ignore EP releases for
whatever reason, when I find EPs more often contain generally superior material and the
release only fell into that class because the organizers didn't want to oversaturate their
release, which I believe to be a good thing to avoid. Another is individuals like myself
thinking EPs are a professional appearing thing to be releasing. Of course it all comes
down to judgement and while the two can be used interchangeably and most wouldn't notice
(seeing as some EPs run longer than LPs - defeating the purpose) there is always a better
of the two classifications. If you're running longer than 30 minutes, EP is not what you
should opt for; although if you have 25+ minutes of strong material, perhaps the best
course of action would be to be ambivalent concerning the format - let your audience
determine what it should be in a gesture of letting the music 'speak for itself'. 
	Returning to how the AKAI unit comes into play here, I must also observe that the
uniformly 1/4-in jack in and out configuration renders it a very useable piece of
musical equipment. You can treat it as as a host of things - a longform sampler, a track
player, a multifaceted recording facilitator, an instrument (see APC's keyboard player
or whatever's Rig Rundown featuring a cassette recorder with infinite loops of various
isolated chord notes composing the four tracks being treated as an performative object),
and likely a few more. But quite simply it marries durability with dependability and
creativity-encouraging constraint.