when it says 8 track recorder and yet there are not 8 audio in ports

you have obtained my anger

@icedquinn maybe they're counting stereo as 2 tracks

In which case you could get around it by just hard shifting left and right to completely different tracks

@beardalaxy yea a lot of audio equipment likes to do that.

or they do silly shit like have two XLR, two 3.5, and two onboard microphones, and say that's different ones.

i dunno. i don't need one but i was looking at a few recorders and they seem to do silly business like this a lot.

@beardalaxy yeah. that's what they did. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/DP008EX--tascam-dp-008ex-8-track-digital-portastudio

two XLRs and the L/R channels on a normal jack

@beardalaxy suppose it's not really a big deal anyway. most field interviews are just gonna be like two people anyway so even finagling four mono inputs is probably significantly more than enough. and they don't even really need to be lock-step recordings for that kind of shit (apparently tascam also makes these little pocket things where the shirt mic plugs directly in to it and they just record it right there and go fish the sd card out later and cut it all together.)