Hard Disk REcording

[Simon Musgrave]

In reply to Nick Thiebereger's question, I have been using a Nomad
Jukebox 3 for field recording for the last year. This is a commercial
MP3 player which offers the facility to record uncompressed (48khz
sampling rate, bit rate not specified but I'd guess 16) audio on to a
20GB hard disk. The audio is saved as .wav files and can be transferred
to a PC by USB or Firewire cable. I have not had any problems with the
machine so far, so reliability seems to be OK. Below, I list a few pro's
and con's for this equipment. Most of the negatives are a result of what
the unit was designed to do - it wasn't meant to be a high quality
recorder!

PRO
- reasonable price (under $800 with extra battery)
- good battery life, claimed 22 hours playback with two batteries, I
have recorded 3 hours continuous and only used about 1/2 to 2/3 of the
charge
- small and light
- fast transfer to computer, packaged software is OK
- straighforward operation

CON
- no microphone input, you have to use a preamp to boost your mike
signal to line level
- even with preamp, recording levels tend to be on the low side
- no level monitoring - the gain control on my preamp is the only way I
have of changing the recording level, and I have to make a trial
recording if I am concerned about the level

If anyone would like further information, feel free to contact me on or
off list.

Simon


--
Simon Musgrave
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
Endangered Moluccan Languages: Eastern Indonesia & the Dutch diaspora
Linguistics Program, LCL
Monash University
Victoria 3800
Australia

Simon.Musgrave at arts.monash.edu.au
+61 (0)3 99052196 (phone)
+61 (0)3 9905-8492 (fax)
Personal page:
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ling/musgrave.htm
Project page:
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ling/maluku