Multi-Track Digital Recording On A Pc?

Question relating to...

Cakewalk Software Guitar Tracks

Asked by: seanachie60

Hi, i want to lay down seperate tracks,
guitar first,
then Listen to that, in time and play mandolin (recording)
and listen to those 2 in time and play fiddle (recording)

i know i can do this on a 4 track recorder, (fostex, yamaha et al. )

is there a software (cakewalk or other) and hardware combo to do it on my laptop so i can totally miss the tape hiss and just do it digitally?
mandomic, wow, great info but a LOT more than i wished to spend. I am checking on the digitek solution left by another user, thanks for the input.
I wanted it mainly to lay down some tracks so i could practice celtic fiddle. Think im going to give that up and stick with guitar, mandolin and the other 6 instruments i play, fiddle is fun but a bit beyond me at the moment.
thanks again everyone for the good answers.
rock on

Answer

Submitted by: D

I know exactly what you need because I myself was once in this position.
The cheapest, best, and easiest way to do this is to buy an RPX-400 from digitech. It looks like a fancy guitar pedal, but it allows you to plug any instrument, microphone, etc. Into it and it runs these through a usb wire to your computer. PLUS, it comes with cakewalk's Pro-Tracks which is in my opinion (and I'm pretty computer un-savvy) the easiest multitrack recording software to use. So you can record track after track while listening to the tracks you've already recorded.

The final product sounds pristine and professional