Lx Field & Lab gear

[Alexandra Jaffe]

In response to Richard's query, I can report good experiences with the
ARCHOS MP3 recorder, which I used this past summer for fieldwork. It costs
about $250, and can record up to 10 hours on one battery charge. The
recording is made directly to a 6MB hard disk, as an MP 3 file, which you
can then transfer with a click of a mouse to your computer (through a USB
connection). This means that for most research recording situations, you can
turn it on and never have to change a tape or disk in the middle of an event
or an interview. The recording quality is very good with the external
microphone.

A word of advice: you must buy the external microphone from Archos,
otherwise it does not work. If you use the built-in condenser mike, you also
record the hard disk access noise. Other external mikes I tried did not
work. At the time of my purchase, I had to go to the French Archos site to
locate this microphone, but I imagine Archos USA is now selling it.

The only downside to using this recorder is that you can't just press
"record" and go. You have to create a new file and type in a name for it. So
it is not good for impromptu recording. It also does not have a "pause"
function. If you stop recording, you have to go through a cumbersome process
of setting up a file (typing in a file name etc.). However, given the
recording time length, you can forego pausing and just edit files later.

Misty Jaffe

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu
[mailto:owner-linganth at ats.rochester.edu]On Behalf Of Don Carroll
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 1:08 PM
To: Richard J. Senghas; Linganth List
Subject: Re: Lx Field & Lab gear


Richard (and others),

At 07:39 PM 9/24/02 -0700, Richard J. Senghas wrote:
>For myself, I'm currently tinkering with SignStream 2.0, which now has
audio
>capacity. SignStream is an application limited to the Mac (alas) that does
>do tiered transcriptions that tags to video. Originally developed for sign
>language work, it can easily be used for spoken language, too. It's really
>cheap, $10/copy or $25 for a department! With an iBook or PowerBook and a
>digital video camera, pretty cool stuff can be done with videotaped
>discourse. (And with iMovie & iPhoto, pretty impressive presentations
>suitable for AAA sessions can be made quite quickly and inexpensively.)

How does this software compare with the (freely downloadable) CLAN software?

Don Carroll
Shikoku Gakuin University