This post is a two-parter

[triedunture]

As part of the elder's history project I'm helping out with at SAGE, I needed to go buy a small digital voice recorder so that when I conduct interviews I'd have a good recording to transcribe.

I went to B&H in midtown near Penn station and, holy crap, guys. It was like Willy Wonka's factory had stopped making chocolate and started selling electronics. It was a whirlwind of efficiency and conveyor belts. A very nice young man helped me pick out the cheapest recorder that would still record in mp3s: a Sony IC Recorder.

It seems like a handy little device, very straightforward. I still can't figure out how to turn it off without taking out the AAA battery it runs on, but I suppose you're meant to keep in "on" and ready to record at all times. It should be fine for just recording the interviews to be transcribed later.

But I wonder if it would be a better device to record podcasts and podfics on. Surely you noticed that the quality of my homemade recordings, done with a rather pathetic Logitech headphone/mic combo, are not all that great.

Here's a test.

This is a recording done on the Sony IC.

This is a recording done with the Logitech via Audacity.

Both are unedited. I think you can see how the Sony IC sounds more crackly, but the Logitech records at such a low volume that, in order to hear it, the track has to be pumped up to the point where it, too, becomes crackly. I don't know. I guess it all washes out the same way.

Thoughts on recording devices?


AND ALSO:


If you like literature, and you like to see new literature published with an eye towards the new, exciting, young, and frothy, please consider donating a buck or two to Fringe Magazine.

Fringe was the first "real" (as in non-university owned) publication that ever published my original work. I'm not going to link to it here, because it's an old story that I wrote in college and I now cringe to see it. But if you know me well enough, you can probably hunt it down in their archives.

Fringe also has a sweet blog with lots of literary folks chiming in, and I contribute a rather silly look at the internet. My newest post is about Twitter if you're interested.

OK, PSA over. Back to regularly scheduled whatsits.