Flutterby™! : voice recorders 2006-11-16 16:53:41.338915+00

voice recorders

2006-11-16 16:53:41.338915+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Here's one that maybe Mark V can answer, because of his foray into podcasting: I'm in the market for a small lightweight voice recorder. The specific application is that I'd like to be able to "take notes" while riding my bike. I guess "perfect" would be something that I could tag an external mic on to and tie to my brake hood, so that I could operate the start and stop features there (because at 25MPH in exposed wind, I'm guessing that the automatic "start recording when you hear noise" feature is worthless).

Anyone got suggestions? Or got one lying around that they bought with great intentions but want to sell used?

Several of the less expensive MP3 players also do voice recording. Here's a cheap $25, 512MB one at Tiger Direct. Although it might take some doing to find one with external mic input.

For that matter, even the iPod does - albeit poorly. And yes, I know that if you boot the iPod in Linux you can get 44.1Khz Stereo recording on 3G iPods - tell that to my wife when she was travelling and her iPod reboot into Linux on her... And that doesn't go to 4G or newer iPods - Podzilla doesn't support recording on these yet.

I got a voice recorder for christmas maybe 3 or 4 years back...didn't use it much and I have no idea what ever became of it. But I'll look for it and if I find it, you can have it.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-16 20:17:51.144053+00 by: mvandewettering

Back when I was beginning my podcasting experiments, I toyed with using a small $40 Olympus voice recorder. The quality was at best mediocre, being I suspect 8-bit, 8Khz sound. Olympus does make ones that have direct digital download which is at least more convenient, but I am uncertain as to the sound quality.

Ultimately, I began to use a Dell Axim PDA for all my sound recording, which was quite reasonable, especially when I ponied up some additional bucks for the special microphone that I could clip on. It's a bit spendy though.

I also have a little Samsung Sansa mp3 player which has a builtin recorder. I haven't really tried it, but it at least has digital download and cost around $40. I can't recall if it has a mic jack, but I'll dig around and see if I can find it in the next day or two, and I'll record some samples.

Most of these look small enough that I could probably clip 'em on to my helmet strap. So, yeah, I'd have to move my hands to record, on the other hand if I'm trying to make route notes then I'm probably slowing for a turn anyway.

I guess the real thing I need to do is find some place that'll let me hear sound samples. 8-bit 8Khz is probably just fine for notes to be transcribed later, but only if the microphone is good enough that I'm not fighting all sorts of other noise issues on the way there.