June 15, 2003

Taking Recommendations For Portable Digital Audio Recording

Ok, here's the situation. At some point, I want to be able to record interviews and the like without having to mess with tape (not that I'm doing that currently anyway). I'm not necessarily looking to be able to post the audio itself online; in the main I'll just be doing transcriptions and the like.

I'm looking for low-end in terms of cost. And (this is always the kicker) it needs to interoperate with OS X in terms of pulling the audio files off the device for playback on my laptop.

If you've got any suggestions, please post a comment to this item so I can begin looking around at actual products.

Posted at 06:44 PM | PermalinkComments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
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Comments (4)

  1. steve on 16 Jun 2003

    I use a pogo products ripflash plus:
    http://www.pogoproducts.com/ripflash_plus.html

    which encodes directly to MP3, and has good sound quality (and expandable memory), but doesn't appear to be Mac compatible.

    the Archos Jukebox looks to be Mac-compatible, though I personally didn't like the idea of carrying around a small hard drive, which is a lot less durable than solid-state memory, still, lots of people like it.

  2. Noam on 16 Jun 2003

    Minidisc all the way.

    You can fit 5 hours on one tape (newer models). The sound is good, and the recording is digital (but transfers are analog).

    They are small, inexpensive (i got mine for 285, + 100 for the sony mic), easily editable and easily uploadable into any computer.

    Noam

  3. Andy on 19 Jun 2003

    I used a minidisc recorder/player with my Mac, and thought the recording quality was great. However, you have to do an analog transfer at 1x, so its not quick. There are plenty of products to put the Mac's digital signal onto the minidisc player(http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua1d.html), but much fewer for putting it back on the mac. Something like this might do it, since it has optical in & out (http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua5.html)

    Rumor is the new iPod has digital recording capabilility, but no software to back it up yet. Unless you're in a big hurry, maybe waiting will be worth it.

  4. Andy on 19 Jun 2003

    http://sweetwater.com has all the things you might want. The catalog is free, and is great bathroom reading I'm told.