I've now had a weekend doing stuff on the R24, and have a few thoughts that may be helpful to someone considering one, or moving on from Zoom's MRS series of recorders.
1. The drum machine kits aren't editable (the MRS are) for pan pitch and instrument for each sound. Slight inconvenience.
2. The recording methodology is different. There is no formula assisted song (F.A.S.T) sequencing. Rather than v-takes for each track, recording creates a .wav file. You can subsequently assign this to any other empty track.
3. No dedicated drum track pair, so to create a rhythm song, you need to assign each different drum pattern to a different track and then play them all together using the track sequencer. This is also used to play sample loops too, again each of which need to be assigned to a track. Quite powerful, but a bit of a pain to get going, and far less easy to play the pads along to a song or pattern.
4. The screen is tiny, and many of the patch names need to scroll in the space available, which take more time when you're looking for something
5. Many of the track editing functions available on the MRS have been removed(including my favourite> reverse a section!)
6. The size of the unit is nice, you can sit it on your lap whilst you're doing things on it, and battery operation could let you work outside on a sunny day!
Many of the above lead me to think that, although you can do a lot standalone, it really is oriented towards complimenting a DAW. If you aren't interested in looping and samples, just recording a band, the older MRS series may be a better bet, although the USB card (not included in the MRS is well expensive for what it is, it is handy for getting the files off. But even then, you need to run a util to convert v-takes to .wav.
I think for the time being, I will keep the MRS1608 alongside the R24, but will unload the smaller 1266 soon.
As I said earlier, it is very early days for me, and I'll add thoughts in here, someone sometime might find it useful!
Cheers
MBA
Bear in mind this is initial findings after a few hours of us compared with owning the MRS1266 and 1608 for several years.