Brad makes an excellent point. I have had my Sony voice recorder since April and have about 50 hours of recordings–most of which I have not listened to. There is something about archiving like a digital pack-rat gives a warm fuzzy feeling. However, like the material pack-rat, often times the archives take on ownership rather than being the other way around.
For a songwriter like myself, always on, and portability outweigh some of the other factors such as capacity and sound quality. Ideas often flit by like a butterflies. If it takes 10 seconds to boot up the idea may be lost.
As far as quality vs. quantity, I used to endeavor to play new songs (in my case newly written) more often than older material. Lately, I have been tightening up my sets, focusing on songs that I know well, and only mixing in an occasional new one.
My philosophy is that all time spent listening to music is good time although not all thoses times are equally good. “Saturation” listening time and serious, “quality” listening time need not be mutually exclusive.
-The iHP’s memory is full.
-When the recorded MP3 file size is over 195MB.
-When the recorded WAV file size is over 795MB.
-The recorded time is longer than 5 hours.
-The battery is low.
-When the sampling rate is changed during optical recording.
So if you’re recording to MP3, the maximum file duration you can create depends on the recording quality – the higher the quality, the shorter the duration. I usually use 192kb quality, and that records a bit over two hours.
When it stops, as long as you have battery power left, you can just hit record and start the process over again. I think you can get about 6 hours of recording on a full charge of the battery, though I’ve never tried to time it carefully. (And that also would depend on MP3 quality – the lower quality files use the harddrive less frequently, which saves power.)