We practice every Monday, and we record our practices so we can return to them and listen to things we liked and disliked. It has also helped us focus on specific problem spots and things like that.
Thankfully, the recording studio on campus that we have access to is only for non-commercial purposes, so we won't be able to sell our album, but we're still super excited to have an album produced even though we just got started two years ago.
I didn't think about how musicians in the past had to rely on the live mix for recordings. I'm sure there have always been elements that could be tweaked, but it usually doesn't take us that long to get a recording right.
Maybe you can give Audacity a shot. It's pretty simple, and it works great for what we use it for. Digital equipment is very nice, especially since we're all graduate students so we don't have a lot of money to throw at recording equipment, haha. Thanks for your thoughts.