Rustyspoon - I agree that latency is probably the biggest irritant to me. I've taken a sort of middle ground with my guitar and bass recordings: I use amp simulations that are dedicated to that, externally to my DAW interface. No noticeable latency, and I have the immediacy of the sound and no playing with it afterwards other than fades and pans.

I see lots of comments above about clipping - it's SO easy not to clip in the digital recording domain that you should never ever have to worry about it. Particularly if you have a 24 bit or higher bit-depth interface.

You simply do not have to worry about it if you are using roughly half of the input range. 24 bit puts the digital noise floor (the noise you get from the A/D converter deciding if it is silence or the 1st step above silence)48 dB lower than 16 bit.

You can gleefully record away without clipping very simply AND cleanly.

Now, if you are in fact depending on tape saturation for your sound - then probably you aren't satisfied with any of the simulated tape saturation plugins.

-Scott

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