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Home / News / News Nugget – Tascam Portastudio for iPad gets the band back together

News Nugget – Tascam Portastudio for iPad gets the band back together

Tascam reinvents its portable four-track wonder for iPad

If you had a band in the ‘90s and you were really lucky, you had a Tascam Portastudio. It recorded four tracks to a standard cassette tape and had enough primal EQ and mixing nous to put the guitar player’s volume back to a reasonable level, bounce tracks and pan in some sonic depth on your master. Quality was – by today’s standards – pretty poor, but many a demo tape slid out of one of a Portastudio and into an envelope marked for the attention of EMI’s A&R department.

Now Tascam’s bringing back the original Portastudio, 1984’s Porta One, retuned as an iPad app. You can only record a track at a time and there’s no bussing for effects, but you’ll get your final mix back as a WAV file, which is more likely to get passed around the industry than a tape these days. No guarantee you’ll get your name in lights, but you can be assured of reliving your studio session dreams if you splurge the £5.99 asking price on iTunes.

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Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home