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In article writes:

Having gotten some good advice from this group before, let me toss this
question out. I'm a singer/writer with basic engineering skills, which seem
to be enough for me to master my own stuff for CD.

You may have the skills and experience to record and mix your music.
Mastering your own material for CD production is never a good idea,
particularly if you don't have an extremely accurate monitor system,
something rarely found in a musician's private studio (unless the
musician happens to be somebody like Whitney Houston or Sting). When
will people learn to say "record my own music" instead of "master my
own CD?"

I've already got the wall to wall
recording studio that extends across my entire room. But, the sheer mental
WEIGHT of having to set everything up does seem to interfere with the
creative process.

Why do you have to set it up every time you want to record? That's a
pain in the butt. If you're going to get serious about this, you
should dedicated some space for your gear, leave it set up to record,
and at least give a little attention to the acoustics of the room. And
if you aren't able to dedicate at least that much of your space to
recording, at least for the duration of a project, you aren't serious
enough to make serious CDs. You can make fine demos, however.

I like to relax while I work, and over the years I have found
that it's harder to do because the technology has gotten so complex.

The reason why it used to be easier was that the technology, while not
all that complex, was expensive enough so that few musicians could
afford to own it. You went to a studio where someone else bought,
maintained, and operated the equipment and all you needed to do was
play and sing. Equipment hasn't become more complex, people have
decided that complex technology is what they need in order to make the
recordings they want with the talent they have.

This past week I was reviewing a bunch of old performances I did on my
little 200 dollar Sony two channel minidisc recorder, and I found the
performances to be more relaxed in general, and therefore, probably more
listener friendly.

I don't doubt it. Set up a mic (probably not a very fancy one), push a
button, and start playing. The technical quality isn't what most
musicians today would consider "CD Quality." On the other hand, CDs
have been made from less, and the people who buy those CDs from you at
your gigs won't worry that you didn't record at 192 kHz, or that your
pitch was a little off on a verse, or that you didn't have a full band
playing behind you.

I would PREFER to set up a 4 channel minidisc recorder, or SOME kind of
machine with at least the same quality or better than a minidisc recorder,
like this.
channel 1 for vocal
channel 2 for guitar
channel 3 for stripe (Fsk or SMPTE)
channel 4 for drum machine
Then at least I won't have to retrack my guitar, as well as leaving open
other possibilities for later.

You will likely find that you'll want to re-track your guitar, and
maybe your vocal, too. Stereo drums never hurts, also. 4 tracks was a
luxury in 1958, but the way things are done today, and what's
expected, people pretty much limit 4 track systems to demo recording,
in which case your proposed setup would work just fine. Many of those
integrated recorder/mixer gadgets put out MIDI time code for
synchronizing a sequencer or another recorder without using a track.

I have been researching this for the past week, and I see that TASCAM has a
minidisc 4 track recorder workstation (although it's really 12 channels,
they say- which confuses me. Why call it a 4, if it's a 12?), but the price
is around 1200 dollars. That's too much.

I didn't even know they still made one. I'd suggest that you look at
an 8-track hard disk based recorder. You can get a TASCAM 788 8-track
24-bit hard disk recorder/mixer for around $600 on the street. There's
lots of stuff today that gets you better audio quality than a
Minidisk, more than 4 tracks, and the convenience of everything in one
box for under $1,000.

I just want to spend 200 to 500
dollars for a basic recorder setup that won't hinder me with too many bells
and whistles.

Well, if that's all you're willing to spend, start haunting eBay. The
"pocket" workstations are really cute, but as you suspect, they're not
up to the quality of a CD that you'd want to charge money for, at
least not without a lot of skillful help. The trend today seems to be
to record on flash card memory rather than tape or disk, which means
expensive media if you have several projects "in the works" over a
significant period of time, and few of them record in uncompressed WAV
format if for no other reason than that it would require more memory
than the recorder costs just to record a couple of songs. They're
great as work-notepads though. Fostex has one for about $300 that has
a drum machine built in, as well as a guitar amplifier simulator and
some vocal processing. You don't get a lot of flexibility but you can
get some pretty good ideas of what could happen with the right
equipment. But that's what you get for $200-$500.

To sum up, here's the big question. Are there any simple, basic, inexpensive
machines, minidisc or otherwise, that will allow me to use the 4 channel
setup, as I listed above, and that will permit me to make a digital wav
transfer back to my PC?

Why not record directly on your PC, and put your money into a
respectable audio interface (sound card)? As long as you're going to
use your PC as a production tool, you might as well record to it as
well. But the more non-audio things you use your PC for, the sooner
you start running into audio recording problems.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo