I’ve been craving a digital audio recorder for the last few weeks. When I was a missionary I purchased a microcassette recorder. I’m trying to remember if I had one a few years before that. I must have – at some point.
Anyway, I purchased the recorder and made three tapes. I think the first one was the 30-minute microcassette that came with the device. I filled a 90-minute tape and three quarters of another 90-minute tape with little narrations of what was going on. To aid in memorizing the discussion pamphlets I recorded a couple of them on another tape.
Listening to the tapes, I was pretty pleased. I recorded notes for most of the second half of my mission – at least every now and then.
When the gadget lust hit me for a digital audio recorder, I figured I’d better dig out that cassette recorder. At the very least I wanted to digitize the audio already on there for my mythical mission blog.
There were as many blank tapes in there as there were used ones – so I loaded up a blank one and started recording new things a few days ago.
My dad called me today looking for “Performance Audio” – a local dealer of pro-audio gear. Performance Audio is just the sort of place that I shouldn’t go while this digital-audio gadget lust is so strong. He was looking to get his twenty-year-old compact disc changer repaired. We wondered if this would be a good opportunity to rip all of my parent’s CDs to MP3s.
I had been trying to decide how to record all of my old cassette tapes to a digital format as well. I thought that his nice tape deck would be a good way to do that. And, as long as we had that going, we could digitize all of his old LPs as well.
He thought my idea of ripping to a compact audio recorder was “interesting”. “Interesting” like video-taping a screen is interesting. He chalked it up to generational differences – which it may be. He said he came from a time when bigger was better – which brings me to my real point.
In digital – it hardly matters how big something is. In fact smaller is usually always better. However, in the analogue world – size matters. There are two main reasons: signal degradation – aka “loss” – and resonance.
Digitize cassette tapes
Digitize “vinyl” – LP records
Rip CDs
Acceptable audio characteristics include a. CD bitrates or better b. Full 20 – 20,000 Hz audio range c. Low “noise floor” throughout the capturing system.
Work with Mac OS X 10.whatever on a G4 PowerMac and Windows 7 on a Core 2 Duo Toshiba laptop.
Use existing line-in and Audacity recording software
| Cost | Free |
| Pros | Low cost, immediate start |
| Cons | Low quality of “built-in” components. |
Use external USB audio interface and Audacity or whatever comes with the interface
| Cost | USB audio interface, $100 - $200 |
| Pros | Good quality of low-cost audio interface |
| Cons | audio interface is limited in use to this application |
Use a standalone digital recorder (Olympus ls-10/11 or Marantz PMD-661)
| Cost | $300 - $600 |
| Pros | Self-contained, computer not required for actual recording; use of external recorder after this project. |
| Cons | cost, reservation about quality of recorder hardware |