A sound investment

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20873433.post-57752174016644645222007-12-09T10:55:00.001Z2007-12-09T10:55:45.317ZA sound investmentDictaphones or pocket cassette recorders can be a real boon to professional communicators. You can use them for taking audio notes, tape interviews or even record telephone calls with a suitable adaptor. Taping interviews is no substitute for decent notes or shorthand, but can be a useful back-up. But in the old days it meant keeping an eye on the tape to make sure it didn’t run out, you could never find the recording you wanted and well, they were sooooo last century. But not any more. The latest recorders are now, you guessed it, digital. Instead of tape you have a memory chip. And instead of being able to record only 45 minutes you can record hours and hours worth. But the good news doesn’t stop there. The latest generation of digital recorders can be plugged into your PC and Mac and the sound files transferred across to your hard drive. This means that you can take your precious recordings with you or back them up to CD or DVD. As an example of what you can do I recently tested an Olympus WS-200S digital voice recorder. This has an integrated stereo microphone for high quality recording, four recording modes - SHQ and HQ mode for superior quality and SP and LP for extended recording Its recording time is 4 hr. 20 mins in Stereo High Quality (SHQ) mode and up to 54 hr. 50 min. in LP mode. But the remarkable thing is its size, or lack of it. Measuring about the size of a small chocolate bar (94 x 40 x 15.1 mm) and weighing 54 g it really is pocketable. Powered by a single AAA battery, that lasts for about 13 hours, I can’t think of an easier way to take notes. You can even plug an external microphone in too, which does give noticeable better quality. You can change the speed by pressing the PLAY button while the recorder is playing back. If you press the button once it will play 25% faster if you press it again it will play 50% faster. But this isn’t like the old days. It doesn’t sound like Mickey Mouse, the person you recorded just seems to talk a lot faster. You can also vary the microphone sensitivity – the highest position works well for lectures and presentations while the lower setting is better suited to one-on-one interviews. But the great thing is that once you have finished recording you just pull off the end cover and plug it into your computer’s USB port. This mounts it like a memory stick and you can now drag and drop all your sound files across to your hard drive. You don’t need any other software or cables, which is great when you are on the move. The files are stored in Window .wma format that plays with no problems using Windows Media Player. If your machine can’t handle .wma files there are plenty of utilities that can convert them to other file formats. I used a PC program called WinFF to convert them to wav files, although it could quite as easily convert to MP3. But this got me thinking – in HQ stereo mode just how good are the sound files? Could this little recorder be used to produce quality recordings for podcasts? My normal recorder for these is a Sony MiniDisk, which offers Hi-Fi/CD quality, but you then need to stream them back to the PC in real time to digitise them. You can get solid-state recorders now, such as those made by Edirol, but they start at about £300. Tests shows that with an external microphone and the highest quality settings the sound files were in fact pretty good with only the slightest signs of compression/clipping. In other words, as long as you accept the slight decrease in audio quality the Olympus WS200S can be used to record audio interviews for podcasts. If you want to hear for yourself listen to the podcast I recorded at the 2007 CiB Conference on the CiB website at www.cib.uk.com. At just £75 that makes it a bargain, but even if you don’t want to stretch to podcasting it still makes an excellent little recorder.Steve Nicholshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03564402221894277279noreply@blogger.com