The Schloss Rules:
1. Only digitize once. Do not re-digitize.
2. Use the best A/D that you have available.
This could be either
the DAT or Digi001 or whatever. I often prefer DAT, because
then I have a "for-free" archive of the original material
that is off-line, and much less likely to disappear, especially
after a few years. But there is another reason to use the
DAT (if you are doing an acoustic recording using microphones):
the electrical and acoustical environment of other A/D's (especially
the one in your sound card) is likely not optimal. Why?
Because it's inside your computer (electrical noise), and worse,
it's inside or next to your horribly noisy computer with fans and
hard drives spinning. You can turn all this stuff off when
you record to DAT, or you can move to a silent room with no computers
at all. Note that the digital transfer you do later from DAT to
Digi001 (or other interface) is not subject to any of these problems.
3. Do not resample unless you have to.
This usually means
recording at 44.1. If you have access to very high sampling
rates, you can record at 96kHz or higher, get a higher-quality recording,
and then downsample when you're finished. In this case it's
worth it.
3a. Don't use MP3 files as source material for mixes or other forms of sound manipulation.
They are fine to listen to as a final product, but they are not appropriate as source material because the perceptual coding will cause problems when the sounds are manipulated.
About EDL's: When you use ProTools or other similar professional sound editors to create your edits and mixes, you are doing non-destructive editing. That is to say, you are not modifying the source soundfile itself, but rather making a list of edits that don't "touch" the source file, but create the desired edit in real time as the sound is played back and the mix is created. You are creating/modifying an EDL (Edit Decision List), which is simply a list of edits and pointers into the sound file that tell the computer what to do. It seems like you are modifying the original file (this is an illusion that makes working easier), but you aren't.
Exception: in Pro Tools Free and LE, some effects are too computationally expensive to be done "on the fly," so these are saved as audio files in the Audio folder or in the Fades folder in your Digidesign folder. On more expensive systems, everything is done in realtime, and there is no need to store any extra files.
Thus,
your EDL file is usually very small, even though the source sound
file could be huge; furthermore, you could have 100 different
mixes and you'd be taking up only slightly more disk space.
The only large files are the original source files, and any files
that are generated by plugins. With more expensive systems, everything
is done in real time, and there are no other files other than
the EDL.
Note: You can set Sync Mode to either INTERNAL, or to S/PDIF from Setup>Hardware menu. Either one should work. Note that if you set it to S/PDIF and the DAT machine is on, it will take the sampling rate from the DAT, which may be wrong! If you're not actively using any other device in your setup, set Sync Mode to INTERNAL.