mbox

hey there,

if your looking to record a band, especially live, you should defintely look into the Digi 002, 002r. That, coupled with an 8 channel frontside ADAT pre (digimax LT, octopre), you should be good to go, mics not withstanding. that setup, with PT LE, the pre, and some decent SM57's and at least a condenser for vocals, youd be surprised of the results. that setup can run just under $2000, if you look hard enough.
also, make sure your laptop has some headroom above the minimum required specs set by digidesign. PT can suck the life out of a comp, but if its optimized, you can track several channels at once.

thanks

Like I said before, I would love to use PT LE w/ 002, but it gets pricey. What do you, or anyone, know about the MBox. If I get an 8 channel mixer and a decent sound card (I think creative labs makes one for laptops) would I be good to go with the factory bundle MBox?

ok

the 002 rack you can get used now for around 800-900. the 002 mixer-version is around 1800-2000...
you could always get the mics into a cheap mixer, run a stereo out of that into the mbox, and record everything into 2 stereo tracks. just make sure the mix out of the mixer is solid, cause you wont be able to change much in PT. this, of course of you choose to track live.
otherwise, get an mbox, use PT, and overdub everything. youll have to do a lot of bouncing with drums, so make sure the drummer can play to a click then quantize it.
mbox is decent...but limited.

mixer

I am not sure what you mean by "a lot of bouncing with drums"
Also when you said overdubing, is that the same as multitracking?
If my band gets a good sound guy, he should be able to do the mixing before recording live, but most of my recording will be multitrack.
What are the limits to the MBox