ipod recording

[William J Poser]

As Susan Penfield says, MP3 is a lossy compression format.
In this day and age, with such large amounts of storage readily
available, there is really no justification for using lossy compression
for language recordings. My advice is:

(a) always record uncompressed PCM data (what is often called "raw");
(b) if you feel a need to compress it, use one of the lossless compression
    techniques, such as FLAC. I've put a few notes on lossless compression
    with links to code at:
      http://www.billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/LectureNotes/LosslessCompression.html
    You may also want to consider some other methods of saving storage:
      http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonetics/SavingSpace.html

One other point to note. WAV is not an audio format. It is a FILE format.
A WAV file can contain audio data in any of dozens of audio formats.
Often what people mean when they talk about saving audio in WAV format
is that the file is in WAV format and contains audio data in raw PCM
format, but you have to be careful. If you don't understand the settings
of the device you are using, you could end up with a WAV file containing
some sort of compressed audio, and a WAV file that you get from somewhere
else is by means guaranteed to contain raw PCM data. (I have some notes
on audio file and data formats at: http://www.billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/LectureNotes/AudioData.html

Bill