Excellent digital recorder for "tune grabbing"

Trad Irish Music
1

For a long time, I’ve been very interested in how to use the best technology has to offer to help me develop my playing skills and accelerate my progress as a traditional musician. As I’ve found products that provide a real benefit, I’ve enthusiastically promoted them to my students and fellow session players.

For a couple of years, along with Minidisc, I’ve been using digital voice recorders from Sony, Panasonic, and Pogo products to quickly grab tunes in sessions, record demonstrations in workshops, etc.

While the quality of these devices has ranged from mediocre to extremely good, the convenience of “instant-on” operation, very small size, and long battery life more than makes up for lack of CD-quality fidelity. Mostly I’m looking to capture the setting of a tune, so I can work it out when I get home.

Yesterday, I bought what I think is probably the best overall digital recorder for this purpose, the Sony ICD-ST10:

http://www.jandr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product_Id=3693363

This very small recorder distinguishes itself by doing stereo recordings up to 45 minutes, and very high quality mono recordings up to 141 minutes. It has a built-in speaker and stereo microphone, and with Sony’s latest LPEC audio codec, provides extremely high quality audio. Using its USB interface and supplied Sony software, transferring the recordings to the PC and converting to .WAV format is extremely fast and simple.

Since it also has a stereo plug-in power microphone jack, you can use all of the same microphones typically used for Minidisc recording to make even higher quality recordings. The microphone I’m using most is the Sony ECM-DS70P

http://www.jandr.com/JRProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=1&Section_Id=961&Product_Id=1627436&showcase=t

In the photo on the J&R website, its hard to see, but the cord detaches right at the microphone and its possible to just plug the mike head right into the recorder without the cord.

Another feature of this unit is the ability to instantly slow down the recording playback up to 50% without shifting the pitch, while maintaining very high quality. This alone is enough to make this unit the one of choice for traditional players.

I’m extremely pleased with this unit, and at $149.95 MSRP, it is very reasonably priced for the feature set. For about double the price, you can get the Sony ICD-MS515 that uses memory sticks for unlimited recording time, but doesn’t support the stereo recording function. Sony has also announce the ICD-ST20 version with double the memory, but its only for sale in Japan at this time.

I’ll still use a Minidisc recorder when I need near CD-quality recordings of concerts or long classes, but for grabbing tunes in sessions or at a festival, the latest in digital recorders offer amazing versatility.

Cheers,

Michael Eskin
http://www.michaeleskin.com

2

I’m curious: Did you look into the Archos Jukebox?

http://www.archos.com/products/prw_500277.html

It’s more expensive, but records through a mic (using the built in one or your own external mic) direct to MP3 and can store up to 300 hours of music. I’ve been interested in these units for the past year, but don’t know anyone who actually has one. I suspect this recording technology will replace minidiscs before very long.

I’m sticking with minidisc for now and waiting to see if Apple comes out with a recordable iPod. The new iPods do have recording capability but it’s very limited.

3

I came very close to buying one of these last week, but after wading through the material available online, i decided it’s not a mature product yet.

For example, the Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 makes you name your recording (using a slow cursor-based letter-pick thing) before you start, or else, each recording overwrites the previous one. The more expensive FM model (including a FM receiver) is a little better (it knows how to append a sequential number to the file name), but click here to check the horrible reviews. There are more, and i even exchanged emails with a frustrated Archos user (PM me if you want the guy’s address) who confirmed that the unit is unstable and unreliable.

There are a lot of other reviews available online, and to me the most damning thing is that everybody seems to agree that Archos has no customer support.

The Creative Labs “Nomad” Jukebox 3 (20 or 40GB) seems to be a much better product, but even there, the recording function seems to be an afterthought.

It’s very cool that these products are starting to appear, and i think maybe in an year or so they’ll actually start being usable.

4

Actually, I have the Archos Jukebox recorder, 6 GB version. Fantastic MP3 jukebox, lousy device for grabbing tunes at sessions:

  1. About 10x the physical volume of the Sony digital recorder

  2. Internal mike is just about useless since it picks up the whirring hard disk noise

  3. No microphone level input, only line level, requires an external preamplified microphone, such as those from Sound Professionals (I have one of those as well, to use with a Pogo Ripflash).

Unfortunately none of the MP3 recorders really address the needs of the amateur acoustic musician. The Pogo Ripflash comes very close, but their terrible microphone and lack of any level controls generally results in very distorted recordings.

I’ll be the first in line to buy from the first vendor to put out a small MP3 recorder that:

  1. Uses removable media, preferably SD or CompactFlash
  2. Records direct to MP3
  3. Has a descent internal mike with some level control, or provides a standard size stereo minijack plug-in power mike level input (Ripflash Trio has a mike input, but its non-standard).
  4. Shows up as a USB mass storage hard disk device (no proprietary transfer software).

But for now the Sony is nearly perfect… just needs more memory.

Cheers,


Michael

5

Thanks for the feedback on the Jukebox units – they sounded a bit too good to be true, and it seems like that’s indeed the case.

The Sony looks nice but I’m still gonna hold out for a recordable iPod – I’d like to get an iPod anyway but I’ll wait a few years in case Apple offers a new model that can record from a microphone direct to MP3 or (even better) AAC. It looks like they’re headed in that direction based on the latest models that came out a month or so ago.

I seriously doubt that minidisc will be a viable option much longer…there’s very little market in the US; it’s mostly in Japan and Europe, and even there it’s not all that big. I don’t think Sharp is offering minidisc recorders for the North American market anymore (almost all the new models I’ve seen are imported Japanese versions), which leaves just Sony.

6

An it’s their fault (Sony’s), for crippling the format not allowing us to get our files digitally out of it. The way it is right now, the minidisk is a glorified cassette recorder. Yes, it’s digital internally, but analog in and out as far as i’m concerned. However, it’s priced way too high for that. I’d buy one for US$80, but heck i’m not going to spend $300 on one; i have a perfectly good portable stereo cassette recorder.

I stopped at Guitar Center today and saw that Korg has a couple of digital music recorders, but it looks like they do one channel at a time (at least the ones i saw) and still cost $500.

But all the signs are here, this is an idea that will catch as soon as something like the Archos but with better quality appears. Or, as you said, a recoding iPod. I’d buy one of those.

Actually there’s a pretty good chance that the recording iPod will come out soon, because i’ve just had to replace my aging Palm Pilot. Usually products like this come out very soon after i spend money on another related but inferior product.

One more note: the consumer reviews in http://www.epinions.com have been invaluable for me, to get beyond the hype on this kind of products. As usual, give more weight to the reviews of people who have had the product for more than a few weeks.

7

The way it is right now, the minidisk is a glorified cassette recorder. Yes, it’s digital internally, but analog in and out as far as i’m concerned.

Well, it does do digital optical in, which is a nice feature. I recently had to take a longish train trip, and I copied a bunch of CDs onto minidiscs to listen to on the way. My CD deck has optical out, so I plugged that into the optical in on my minidisc recorder and hit record. No need to set levels or insert tracks manually, it’s all automatic, and the sound is great.

It’s possible to buy minidisc decks with optical out, but not the portable players/recorders. You’d have to be pretty committed to the technology to spend that kind of money, though…they’re not cheap.

8

The digital in is nice for putting CDs in a smaller format. In this sense, the minidisk works like an MP3 player. But i need to record from a microphone.

The digital out is nice too, but i bet it goes only from minidisc to minidisc, not from minidisc to CD.

9

After trying (as suggested above) to track down Archos reviews, I found the following webpage: http://rockbox.haxx.se

It details the Rockbox project, which is a free open source replacement for the Archos operating system. It sounds like it already addresses the issues with recording mentioned above – onboard recording level monitoring and automatic non-duplicate file names seem to be built in, if I’m reading the page correctly.

But better yet, they’ve completely worked out how to program the unit. Looks to me like it should be possible to script a custom UI designed especially for field recording/tune grabbing…

Think I may get me one of these babies and give it a try.

10

I saw that (Rockbox). But the thought of spending $300 on the hardware and then loading something that would probably void the warranty (but would it???) didn’t appeal to me. Also, some of the problems people were describing about the Archos were hardware related (they say it freezes, it lies about how much battery’s left, etc). Worse of all in my opinion, everybody seemed to have horror stories about Archos customer support.

I also read that some functions don’t work well with Rockbox in the new “FM” Archos model. If i had unlimited funds (heh!), i’d buy an Archos Jukebox 20 (without the FM), load the Rockbox OS and see what happens… If i had even more unlimited funds, i’d buy a portable DAT. They only cost about $1500 these days (hehe!).

Remember you also have to buy the Archos microphone. The only place i’ve seen the microphone for sale is in archos.com.

Good luck and let us know! :slight_smile:

11

I compiled the Rockbox Archos simulator this morning. Now I need to get the GCC cross-compiler for the Archos up and running. More soon.

12

Yes, definitely let us know. If you are going to buy an Archos and use it for recording, i’m very interested in hearing what you think about it after a couple months of use.

One more thing: the Archos only supports MP3. The Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox 3 supports (uncompressed) WAV too. This may be important if you want to make high-quality recordings, such as mastering for a CD, or if you intend to digitally edit the sound files after you record them.

I wonder if the Rockbox OS is able to add file formats to the Archos besides MP3.

13

The Rockbox is NOT able to add file formats – there’s a specialized DSP chip in there that handles the MP3 encoding/decoding, and they don’t have any good way of reprogramming it. I don’t really see that as a problem – unless you’ve got an obscenely good mic setup, MP3 is probably going to capture all the fidelty available, I would imagine. (Well, I suppose if you could patch into the mixing system at a concert…)

I’ve got the Rockbox simulator running on my Linux box now. (Though I don’t have any sound – don’t know if that is how the simulator works, or simply because my Linux box doesn’t do sound right – brand new Linux install as of Thursday, and some of these things haven’t been properly tested yet.) I’ve poked through their source code, and it looks reasonably understandable and fairly well written.

14

Here’s some examples of recordings I took during sessions/classes with the Sony unit this weekend at the annual Summer Solstice music festival in Calabasas, CA:

http://www.uptospeed.net/mp3/eskin/that_jig.mp3
http://www.uptospeed.net/mp3/eskin/that_reel.mp3
http://www.uptospeed.net/mp3/eskin/tripping_to_the_well.mp3
http://www.uptospeed.net/mp3/eskin/barn_dance.mp3

These were all using the external plug-in T style stereo microphone. The recordings were transferred in their original Sony LPEC format, converted by the Sony software to .WAV stereo 16-bit 44.1 KHz, and then to 64 kbit .mp3.


Cheers,

Michael

15

Thanks for posting these, that’s great!

The sound is a little compressed and lacking in the high frequencies as i thought, but very clean and, IMHO, more than enough for learning tunes. Actually, the compression maybe even makes it better for you to learn the melody.

g

16

Here’s some examples of recordings I took during sessions/classes with the Sony unit this weekend at the annual Summer Solstice music festival in Calabasas, CA:

Nice – the sound quality is about the same as what I get on my minidisc recorder using that little T microphone.

By the way “that jig” is one of Brendan Tonra’s, and is usually just called “Tonra’s.” I can’t remember the name of “that reel” at the moment.

17

Michael,
On J&R website, it says that this recorder will tape up to 5 hrs. 34 min. would this recording mode be insuffient for taping sessions…?

18

Michael [and others]

What mini-disc do you use? or recommend?

Boyd

19

Sony is the only one making minidisc recorders for the North American market anymore, but you can still buy some Japanese-market Sharp recorders from minidisco.com and other outlets.

I prefer Sharp, mainly because when I bought mine a few years back the Sony models made it far too easy for you to erase a partially recorded minidisc because their default setting would start recording at the beginning of the disk when you re-inserted it. Knowing my absent-minded tendencies, I would have lost a lot of good music that way, so I went with Sharp. I think Sony has since addressed that problem and others.

The Sonys on the market now all look pretty good to me – check out http://www.minidisco.com and look at the selection there. If you are willing to put up with lower sound quality for a longer-recording disk, make sure you get one with MDLP capability. Don’t bother with the ones that connect to your computer by USB – that’s just for downloading tunes TO the recorder, not the other way 'round. Portable minidisc recorders only let you send music to your computer in analog format; there are some decks that let you do it digitally but they’re expensive.

20

It is now possible to use a PocketPC as a digital music recorder:

http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/008653.php#008653