Why I buy this one ?
- Ultra portable, only slightly larger than an iPod
- 4-track playback, 32 V-Tracks
- Loads and plays MP3 files
- Multi-effects onboard, dedicated guitar input
- Time-Stretch and Center Cancel features (including MP3 files)

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What our customer's say!

"Don't rush out and buy this before reading my review!", I am a guitar player who travels a lot, and I was looking for something to take with me when I travel frequently to record ideas and to practice. I wanted portability, ease of use, and decent sounding guitar tones.

First, the cons. This Micro BR is very confusing to operate and not at all intuitive. This is the biggest complaint that I have about this product. You will spend way too long wasting your time reading the manual and figuring out how to use it, only to later forget how to perform a particular function. If you are a guitar player, I think you find the clean tones to sound very good and the distorted tones to sound very cheesy.

As far as the pros to this unit, I think the main advantage is its size. If you MUST have something this small to record ideas and want to have basic multi-track functions, and don't mind spending a long time learning how to use it, then you will probably be satisfied with it.

Otherwise, save your money and time and save up for something better!

"Unbelievable digital recording, effects, multitracking, metronoming, guitar-rocking, rock-star singing, college-lecture device ", I have had this thing only one week, and it is one of the coolest things I have EVER bought. Period. I still gaze at it everyday and salivate, the way you might on your new car. But this only cost me $177 so it feels even sweeter.

Before I bought, I read the reviews here and was worried it would be too menu based and techy. However, with less than one week of fumbling around and (joyfully) playing with the device, I have recorded the RH piano section of Sweeny Todd on track 1, the LH section on track 2, bounced them together to a new track 1, added my own vocals to new track 2(both me and piano recorded with built in AWESOME mic). Then I mastered it down to one track, and bounced it to an MP3 file. (ALL INSIDE this tiny device). And I only read the instruction book for maybe 10 minutes.

After I had my MP3 file, I used the USB out on the device to plug into my Dell XPS desktop. Then I used iTunes to put the file of ME, ME, ME onto my iPod!

That screams!

Last night, I used the device to record, in one take, my entire 3 HOUR rehearsal for the musical I am in, Urinetown. (I bought a two-pack 2 GIG SD cards at Costco yesterday for $35. 3 Hours on High Quality setting only took about 1/3 of the 2 GIGS!) (The device came with a 128MB chip that I was earlier able to record 1 hour 38 minutes onto.) I set the recorder next to the left wall of a very large, echoey warehouse space we are rehearsing in. Hardly a recording studio! It's been crazy practicing there, because even if two people are whispering in the corner you can here it everywhere, in a distracting way. Understand the cast has 30 PEOPLE, 3 of them hyper 14 year olds, a couple senior citizens, and all around, a boisterous, A-D-D type of crowd! Add yelling directors, assistant directors, the musical director, and the pianist, and, well you get the picture. I didn't even tell people I was recording.

So even in conditions like this, I have been listening to the 3 hours again today and I can't believe how good it sounds. It sounds as good as shows I was in back in high school that we recorded using multiple Shure SM57 microphones tied through a mixing board into a sweet 80's tape deck rack.

I would have killed to have had this thing during my college days. I could have recorded and archived all my wonderful lectures on my hard drive (incredibly this ENTIRE DEVICE is much smaller than that old hard drive!) You can even listen to songs or lectures in the MP3 mode, and speed it up to 200% or slow it down to 30%, while keeping the pitches all in tune. AMAZING.

If I lost this thing or dropped in water or somehow destroyed it, first I would cry. Then I would get very, very angry. Then I would cry some more and throw a full-on temper tantrum unlike any seen from me since I was 5.

Then I would beg, borrow, or steal to get another one.

Actually I'd come right here to Amazon and order it next day air. But I really would cry at first.



"Slight learning curve but follows roland/boss schema", Extreme portability comes with a price (and I'm not talking $$$!)--few buttons, several layers in the interface, and yes you need to cut-n-paste errrat corrections into the manual. Plug your guitar in and SHUT UP! If you have any of the Roland/BOSS high-tech products (synths, GT-6, GR-03,...) then you already had a taste of how the manual reads and you'll pick up the User Interface schema quicker than the next guy. Let me tell you how I've used my Micro-BR the last 3 months.

Spent about 20 minutes cuting the errata and pasting it in appropriate spots (and then went online and downloaded the pdf--duh!), read the manual. Plugged in my guitar and worked through the manual over a few days. By the end of the month I had recorded a raw vocal hard Left, Raw piano hard right--several original songs (not mine). I backed it up to my Linux (yes LINUX) box--no need for windows or special drivers. I took the next month to tweak around and test different settings on the channels. A computer DAW or larger board would have been easier, but I figured out how to bounce raw tracks through effect layers to reach a couple of finished virtual tracks to choose from. The mastering setting levels volumes and outputs to mp3--the trick is making sure you still have enough space on the device BEFORE committing. So yeah with some effort and a little sweat I got it done--I like it, the musician hasn't heard it yet.

Still tweaking the piano stuff above (overlaps a little), but I took a break to record through built in mic our practice session so everybody could hear what we sounded like 20 feet from the stage immediately after the song. I took out the SD card with the piano stuff on it and inserted another card for this purpose. It would make a good bootleg, but plug into the board if they'll let ya! And I recorded some riffs to practice a solo over. I have not used the kareoke center-cut feature yet. I use the Godlyke 9volt power supply (look it up its worth every penny) but the batteries went fairly long for two AA's.

I took this thing camping and to a 3-day conference in the city. I played through it into our board at a show (not recommended if you change settings alot--I didn't that night--it was a ska/punk show;)). There were three other products to choose from when I bought this: the zoom, the eiderol and mwave (i think). I was looking for something to portably capture digital audio. The BR does that and its a mini version of my GT-6/cosm modeling amps for the same (or less) price than the others. Hope this captures some first "experience" for some of you--and now the short:

All thumbs--stick with tapes and big buttons.
Some fingers, no patience--do consider "larger" alternatives
Mostly fingers, some patience--really take a close look at this product
Fingers, patience, COSM-dudz--why are you still reading this?

"MICRO BR?...HOW ABOUT MICRO BS", This thing is a classic example of hype over function. Unless you have a degree from MIT, don't even bother looking at it. The one I ordered is going back for a credit first thing tomorrow morning. And someone at BOSS should be fired for the so called "instruction manual" that comes with it. Matter of fact, there are about 3 pages of instruction corrections sent in the box with the unit....yes, it's so CONFUSING, even the people who made it couldn't remember to fit in all the little details. This thing is for gadget geeks, not artist. I dont know what I'm gonna order next to lay down ideas on, but it's gonna be a simple, plug in, push record, have at it, recorder, not this "shove in a ton of garbage like a space shuttle dash board" so called Boss BR....it should be the BOSS BS!!

"Convergent but limited", This is a clever little gadget. It is a portable audio recorder, an effects box, a dictation machine, an MP3 player, and a pocket mirror (no joke - the fascia is very reflective). You can even use it as a guitar tuner. I think Boss was trying to make a convergent device, and they have almost succeeded, but the Micro BR has a couple of quite major flaws that hold it back. If you think of it as a portable guitar effects box with a built-in solid state recorder it's excellent. If you need to record people speaking it's very useful, and small, and silent as it records. It is actually cheaper that some digital dictation machines, and will record voice forever with a 1gb SD card, although the batteries will run down after a couple of hours. It's not so good as a replacement for a four-track tape recorder, however, for reasons I will explain. I own one, I have it next to my keyboard as I write this review, I have owned it for a fortnight, and I have used it every day. The interface takes a while to pick up. The manual is not great. It comes in a nice box. You get a felt-feeling slipcase, two alkaline batteries, and a 128mb memory card that has a demo song on it. There's an erratum slip for the manual. The demo song is a bland rock song. The manual does not say if it was recorded from scratch with the Micro BR; I imagine that it was not.

I will now discuss its limitations. The first and most important limitation is that you can only record from one input at a time. The machine has four inputs. There is a 1/4 inch guitar jack socket, there is a built-in microphone, and there is a 2.5mm socket that doubles as a line input and a powered mic input. If you want to record yourself playing guitar through the 1/4 jack onto track one, and singing into a microphone plugged into the 2.5mm microphone socket, at the same time, you can't. There is an option to combine the inputs of the 1/4 jack and the built-in microphone, but this is not proper multi-track recording, because the resulting sound is automatically mixed together onto a single track. Once you have recorded this guitar and voice combination, you will be unable to split the two elements apart or edit their relative levels. With my old four-track portastudio I could record guitar to track one, mic to track two, at the same time. With the Micro BR you cannot do this. The Micro BR is therefore not quite a proper replacement for an old four-track cassette portastudio with built-in mixer. It plays back four tracks, as per the product description, but it's not technically a four-track recorder. You can record the LINE and EXT microphone onto a stereo pair, so perhaps you could use this to mock up two-track mono recording. I haven't tried it. All of the inputs will record onto two tracks with the stereo ping-pong delay, in which case you get a mono audio input with a stereo delay effect.

This is quite a major knock against the Micro BR as a multi-track machine. A budding songwriter would ideally want to sit in his or her bedroom with a guitar and microphone plugged into the unit, recording each onto a separate track for later mixing and editing, but you can't do that with the BR. There's nothing to stop you from recording guitar and vocal separately, but this isn't as immediate. As far as I can tell - the manual is unhelpful - there's no lead-in when you start recording, so you have to be sharp if you decide to edit your performance. It would probably be easier to dump the memory to your PC and edit that way (the interface is big on specific sequences of the record and play and track buttons).

Interface with a PC is good and bad. There's no installation software because Windows XP (at least, presumably Macintosh and Vista as well) identifies the BR straight away. You can copy the song across to your PC, although it is stored in the BR's internal format. If you want to edit your work on the PC you'll have to either master it on the BR and send it to your PC, or use a piece of software called "BR Series Wave Converter" which is buried away on Roland's US website. In practice I have used this.

The built-in microphone is another limitation, assuming you are not just treating it as a free bonus. It's better than I expected, but it's not very sensitive, and it's noisy. The noise has an unpleasant digital sound to it, as if it was picking up the sound of a television on standby. There is a noise gate effect that mutes an input once the sound falls below a certain volume, but this creates an unpleasant "pumping" sensation as the noise rises and falls, and it is useless if you are recording sustained notes. With the input level turned up, and the microphone sensitivity turned up, the internal microphone would be useful if you were interviewing someone in a fairly quiet location. I would not rely on it in a noisy pub.

I used a Sony ECMDS70PD mini-microphone with the EXT input. It's better than the internal microphone - the signal is louder and the noise does not have the same electronic sound. It's still not good enough for recording e.g. birdsong. I can't really evaluate the EXT input because I would need a very expensive noise-free microphone. If I select EXT with nothing plugged into the machine, there is quite a high noise level, whereas the guitar and line inputs are almost silent. I state at this point that I have been using batteries in my machine - perhaps with a mains power supply it will be quieter, although that would eliminate the machine's portable handiness.

The effects are useful, but fiddly. There is a reverb unit, and a multi-effects unit. The effects are arranged so that the reverb is global, and the multi-effects are clumped into groups per input. If you select the GTR input you get a certain set of multi-effects (the aforementioned plus chorus, flanger, tremolo), and if you select the MIC input you get another set of multi-effects (compressor, noise suppressor, delay, and EQ). If you select the LINE or EXT microphone inputs, you only get a compressor/limiter. At least, it seems like this at first. I have found, by fiddling with the menu, that you can apply any effect to any input, something which the manual does not mention. This is handy if you want to apply guitar effects to an old synthesiser, e.g. a Casio CZ101, which sounds great through the amp and speaker simulators. The manual is poor, and has some errors. There is a correction sheet with the manual, but this still leaves out at least one mistake (you select the guitar tuner by pressing EFFECTS and RHYTHM, as written on the front of the BR, rather than EFFECTS and UTILITY).

There is a built-in drum machine. There are hundreds of patterns, including fills, lead-ins, variations etc. You can't edit them. They are preset. Artistically, they are on the level of a home keyboard. There are several drum kits, most of which sound poor. They have one kick and one snare and one hi-hat each. The one exception to this rule is the 808 kit, which is great, with a big bouncy kick drum. You can apply the global reverb to the rhythm track, but not the other effects, e.g. no phaser, distortion etc. There are some metronome beeps at the end of the drum preset list. The drum machine is perfunctory except as a means of keeping time. You would not want to use the beats in a song.

In its default state, after setting up a new song, the machine applies a dab of reverb and turns on the first multi-effects patch, which is a chorus effect. If you want a dry recording from scratch you have to click through the menus and turn the effects off, including the input reverb. This is a bore.

All in all the Micro BR is useful if you work around its limitations. It's not really a replacement for a four-track tape recorder. If you want to edit your work into a song you would be much better off using a PC. Think of the BR as a guitar effects box that can record audio, or a battery-powered roving recording unit. If you want to practice guitar silently, and perhaps jot down some riffs, perhaps even work on a simple arrangement, it's great. You can download MP3 files into it, and play them back, and play along with them, which might be a godsend if you're a busker. The problem is that, as I have said, you only have one input. If you want to play guitar and sing along with MP3 backing tracks through the BR you're stuffed, although I'm sure you could work around this with other equipment.

The crucial factor is the price, which is - as I have said - lower than many plain digital dictation machines, and the nearest obvious competitor, the Zoom H4 (which seems to be aimed at microphonists, whereas the Boss BR is aimed at guitarists).