Did somebody say "Akai"

["american qabalah" <american@qabalah.com>]

(1) I have a question for the group:  Has anyone attempted to use MIDI to
control their Akai DR8 to do sampling/looping?  Also, I am in the market 
for a
nice-but-not-too-expensive 16-track digital hard disk recorder with
compressionless data (at least as an option).  Any suggestions?  Y'all
normally got a million of 'em.  My DR8 weighs about 4500 metric tonnes and
it's really a pain to shlep it back and forth from rehearsals.

Thanks in advance,
Tim