Ooooh. Modern!
Nov. 16th, 2004 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaSo... Here's a dorky little secret.
I record myself. I sing and make up weird songs fairly often and I rehearse lines for animation and film projects and often I just talk aloud and take notes too. So anyhow, I've been using a micro-cassette recorder that I got taking notes in class in um... 1990. Even brand new, this thing was bottom of the line and the sound quality was... Crapulent at best. You can hear the gears of the tape player on the tape, and the audio quality on micro cassettes was never very good at 'high quality play' let alone at 'super long play' mode.
So... I'd observed that digital voice recorders were now insanely dirt cheap now and considerably smaller than my old recorder, so I thought it was about time to upgrade. So, my initial target, the Olympus VN-120 was ~$40 at Fry's and I took Stacey along with me because that made a good excuse to stop at Sneha (indian food buffet) After lunch we went to Fry's and I found the recorder and the story should have ended there, but Stacey noticed that there was an Olympus VN-240PC on sale. Twice the recording time plus it had a mini-USB port so that in the rare instance I might want to dump some piece of audio directly to my computer, it'd be an option. It even said it was Mac compatible on the tag...
So.. i get this thing home and the first thing I notice in the manual is that it says it will NOT operate with Macintosh. WTF? I search online and various sites say it _WILL_ function with Macs. Ooookay... I think maybe this is older packaging and go to their website and sure enough, there's a downloadable program for Mac which I grab and install... I plug it in, the display says USB connected, but it doesn't show up on my Mac and it's own software doesn't seem to have any way to access the device. Stacey notes that this is the 'Lite' version of the program. I do some more searching on their website and there is ONLY the 'lite' version of the software. I VERY CAREFULLY read their website which I now realize says, "PC DOWNLOADABLE and MAC COMPATIBLE"... Yes, that's right. Their FILE FORMAT can be viewed on a Mac but you cannot retrieve the data from a Mac, only a PC. What f***ing slimeballs. Needless to say, I shall be writing nasty reviews for them on various online shopping sites, never buying anything from them again, and Stacey took the thing back for me and exchanged it while I got ready for class.
So... Anyhow, I thought she was going to get me the $40 Panasonic recorder but she was gone a very long time and came back with a package that was quite a different shape. I griped at her when I looked in the sack because it was not the $40 device I expected but a $110 device instead. An iRiver iFP-780. o_O... What did I need with an MP3 player?
...
But there was no time to gripe about it. I had to head to class.
So I took the instruction manual and read through it. Wow. So overly geeky. It has an FM radio built in and you can record directly from the radio to MP3, it also has a line-in that supports up to 44Khz stereo sound and the voice recorder can be set to anything from 8khz to 44Khz and the audio quality is really really good and it's smaller than the voice recorder was and it will let me sort my recordings into folders and such and (I tested later) it actually _DOES_ work with my Mac. So... Hmm... It was more than I'd planned to spent but I now have a miniature recording studio that fits in the palm of my hand which I can use to take notes or record found audio and even snippets from the radio. So.... Not exactly what I'd planned to get but I think I'll get a lot more use out of this than the device I'd intended to get. It jsut feels so... Shiny and modern. It's not like me to have hip and trendy stuff.
I record myself. I sing and make up weird songs fairly often and I rehearse lines for animation and film projects and often I just talk aloud and take notes too. So anyhow, I've been using a micro-cassette recorder that I got taking notes in class in um... 1990. Even brand new, this thing was bottom of the line and the sound quality was... Crapulent at best. You can hear the gears of the tape player on the tape, and the audio quality on micro cassettes was never very good at 'high quality play' let alone at 'super long play' mode.
So... I'd observed that digital voice recorders were now insanely dirt cheap now and considerably smaller than my old recorder, so I thought it was about time to upgrade. So, my initial target, the Olympus VN-120 was ~$40 at Fry's and I took Stacey along with me because that made a good excuse to stop at Sneha (indian food buffet) After lunch we went to Fry's and I found the recorder and the story should have ended there, but Stacey noticed that there was an Olympus VN-240PC on sale. Twice the recording time plus it had a mini-USB port so that in the rare instance I might want to dump some piece of audio directly to my computer, it'd be an option. It even said it was Mac compatible on the tag...
So.. i get this thing home and the first thing I notice in the manual is that it says it will NOT operate with Macintosh. WTF? I search online and various sites say it _WILL_ function with Macs. Ooookay... I think maybe this is older packaging and go to their website and sure enough, there's a downloadable program for Mac which I grab and install... I plug it in, the display says USB connected, but it doesn't show up on my Mac and it's own software doesn't seem to have any way to access the device. Stacey notes that this is the 'Lite' version of the program. I do some more searching on their website and there is ONLY the 'lite' version of the software. I VERY CAREFULLY read their website which I now realize says, "PC DOWNLOADABLE and MAC COMPATIBLE"... Yes, that's right. Their FILE FORMAT can be viewed on a Mac but you cannot retrieve the data from a Mac, only a PC. What f***ing slimeballs. Needless to say, I shall be writing nasty reviews for them on various online shopping sites, never buying anything from them again, and Stacey took the thing back for me and exchanged it while I got ready for class.
So... Anyhow, I thought she was going to get me the $40 Panasonic recorder but she was gone a very long time and came back with a package that was quite a different shape. I griped at her when I looked in the sack because it was not the $40 device I expected but a $110 device instead. An iRiver iFP-780. o_O... What did I need with an MP3 player?
...
But there was no time to gripe about it. I had to head to class.
So I took the instruction manual and read through it. Wow. So overly geeky. It has an FM radio built in and you can record directly from the radio to MP3, it also has a line-in that supports up to 44Khz stereo sound and the voice recorder can be set to anything from 8khz to 44Khz and the audio quality is really really good and it's smaller than the voice recorder was and it will let me sort my recordings into folders and such and (I tested later) it actually _DOES_ work with my Mac. So... Hmm... It was more than I'd planned to spent but I now have a miniature recording studio that fits in the palm of my hand which I can use to take notes or record found audio and even snippets from the radio. So.... Not exactly what I'd planned to get but I think I'll get a lot more use out of this than the device I'd intended to get. It jsut feels so... Shiny and modern. It's not like me to have hip and trendy stuff.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-16 11:12 pm (UTC)On the downside, the combo units don't generally have built in speakers, and the controls are a little more complex. (The reason I went with WaveX, not iRiver, is it does actually have a built-in speaker, but ... I'm not sure it's worth it)
Oh, unless I'm mistaken, I did come across a program somewhere to read the Olympus data on Unix, which should work on OS/X, too. Never tested it, though, and I may be getting different data confused.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-16 11:48 pm (UTC)The iRiver was the fancy model, but she did want music on her bicycle, so it'll work out. It had the quality and most especially the price was closest to what she wanted.
The XWave was more expensive, so I skipped it. There was one other that fit the requirements - in an orange box - but only two were in the whole store and both were the high-end models, having much more storage than Sammi wanted.
I tried to make the decision she'd be happy with 'good quality' and 'cheap' and decided the former was more important. Also, she didn't have an input device on her Mac and that've cost $20-$60 itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-16 11:54 pm (UTC)I think the iRiver unit is a little better, and would have bought one of them myself, if not for the built in speaker - I'm not sure the built in speaker was worth it, though, now that I actually have the device.