I’ve got a friend that wishes to record practices for her choir and play the results back through her mp3 player. A quick peek here and there shows this to be surprisingly difficult.
Any suggestions from the Teeming Millions?
What is the hard part? Recording the music or making an MP3 out of it?
What equipment does she currently have?
Yeah, any half way decent recorder will have a line out and any half way decent sound card will have a line in. Lacking those things could get tricky. You could cobble something together if the recorder has a headphones jack by feeding that output into the mic input of the computer, but it would probably sound terrible and you’d certainly need to mess with the mic levels. Very simple if you know what you’re doing but it could easily seem complicated if you don’t.
Get a MP3 player with a record function.
The word on these is that they’re decent dictaphones but not up to duplicating the function of a cassette recorder, which is the intent.
There’s a $400Edirol on on Best Buy’s site but that’s way beyond the budget.
Line-in/Line-out has been thought of - I’m not sure where to find a cassette recorder with a line-out, though.
Searching the “voice recorder” section of Circuit City’s website shows a couple recorders with the ablity to link and copy to a PC but no note on what format the files are.
How about a headphone jack? Seems to me it’d be hard to find a recorder without one.
Minidisc recorders are actually quite good for this. Alternatively, you could record directly to a laptop running Audacity - this might actually be best, because it avoids one step of analogue transfer between the recording device and the machine that will encode as MP3.
You can even get bits of software that will record directly to MP3 on a PC, but I don’t think there’s any benefit in doing that.
You’ll want to get a fairly good microphone.
How big is the choir?
What she can do is hook up a laptop with a microphone and some halfway decent audio software (like Audacity, which is free). It’ll record and save into MP3 format, then she can just upload the files into her player as she would with any other MP3 file.
Cassette recorders are not the best way to go because they’re noisy. She’d have to do a lot of noise reduction for these files to be useful. They’re also time-consuming because tape is linear – it takes as long to transfer the songs as it does to play them. As others have pointed out, it’s hard to find an affordable tape recorder that can also transfer to computer.
The closest analog might be a portable hard-disk recorder. The one I use (and I’ll be damned if I can remember the model number) has a direct USB plug n’ play connection to the PC, no special software needed, and it goes directly into an MP3 file. She might find one cheaply on eBay or an older model through a specialty electronics retailer that deals in electronic news gathering equipment.
She might also want to contact her local NPR member station and ask to talk to their production engineer. They’re used to recording live music and can probably offer some pointers.
Robin
Also, if she’s not recording using an MP3 player, I see no reason to use such a lossy format. Record to PCM (or wav if you prefer. AIF for Mac) and get superior sound.
One machine we use, which is cheaper than the Edirol is the Samson H4, which has built in stereo mnicrophones, XLR connectors (much better than those crappy phono plugs), USB and it can also work as an external soundcard/HD. Froogle gives you hits for as low as about $240, and the older versions are available for well below $200.
Our retailers over here ship it with a light version of Cubase, which in itself is about a hundred bucks and can be upgraded for another 100 or so to Cubase Studio 4. Shop around. It’s a really good little machine.