With the East Coast Holloween Tionol coming up I want to get an MP3 recorder since the Archos Juxebox one I have is a pain for recording – and then finding the recording. I’m not an audio “geek” so I just need some basic advice on a quality unit that has the features that are most popular with folks on the Forum. I have a good SONY microphone already. I welcome any suggestions. Many thanks.
I’d suggest checking out the new HQ MD recorders which let you record uncompressed digital at a good bitrate.
Dionys
I bought an iRiver player with a 20 giga-byte hard drive. It supports mp3, wav, wma, ogg and other file types. A USB port allows it to connect to a pc whuch makes file transfer a breeze. It has an internal mike (mono) and an input for an external mike. I’ve only used the internal mike so far, but I’m happy with the results I got at North Hero. There was a discussion on one of the other CF forums regarding it. I decided to take a chance on it since it was time to retire the old Marantz 2 speed tape recorder. So far, I’m happy with my purchase.
I’m also very pleased with my IRiver H120, it works exellent. It has really great battery time.
The only bad thing is that you have no control of the recording level while recording, but since the s/n ratio is good, and the communication with computers is easy; it is not much work to add some compression and normalize your recordings in your computer, and the result will surprise you.
I use a thing called an XClef HD500. It doesn’t record uncompressed, but it does have a useable internal microphone (easily good enough to do things like grab session tunes or snips from lessons) and really good sound quality.
I’m not really bothered by other features on the machine itself - I would prefer to get stuff onto the computer to organise it. And conveniently, it has a USB mass storage chip on it, meaning Linuxusing weirdos (like myself) can just plug it in and mount it as a FAT32 filesystem.
Cheers,
Calum
If you’re into higher quality (e.g.: to make a CD of yourself to sell to your family) 
, then you’ll need a good microphone. If you have a “microphone in” jack, then you’re good, there are dozens of good relatively-cheap stereo microphones in the $100 dollar range, that will do a good job.
If you only have “line in”, then you need an amplified microphone. Unless you’re thinking of making one, and especially if you’re in the US, i recommend Sound Professionals. Their stuff is not pretty, but their electronics are very good, and quiet, which is what matters.
g
I use a Marantz PMD-670 for all my field recording these days. Records directly into MP2, MP3, or uncompressed .WAV format. No, its not the perfect choice for everyone but sure the only way to go if you’re planning on using microphones with XLR connectors and need phantom power.
Michael, I have found that darn PMD-670 to be way too frustratingly complicated… it can do so much, but the simple things are overly complicated. I consider myself somewhat intelligent, but this unit has me spitting leather!!! Arrgh!#%?!!
Anyone have experience with the iRiver 195T? I’ve looked at it on line and it seems to have some good features…one thing I can’t tell is whether or not you can connect an external microphone or not.
Thanks,
Gary
Pipey, as stated by glauber, one of the least expensive ways to record is to get one of the new Sony High Density MiniDisc recorders. Make sure it has an external microphone input and not just “line-in”. The HD MD records to a minidisc which with the provided software can be downloaded to your computer.
I wish I had one of those at East Durham as it has taken me forever to get the cassette tapes of Brian MacNamara transferred over to digital media. Anyway, if you want to stay in a moderate to low price range, SONY HD MD is the way to go and you already have the microphone so that saves a few bucks. Sound Professionals have had the best prices on this stuff in my experience.
Regards
Gary, what would the price range of this item be?
Just bear in mind that other older MD players can’t play HD.. And although you can get digital audio out of the new Sony HD minidiscs, you can only extract it via Sony’s “Sonic Stage” software, on Microsoft Windows only, and you cannot export the digital audio to other software or burn it onto anything but Sony-proprietary “ATRAC” CDs. IN other words, Sony has a total lock on the digital media, it’s stored in one big encrypted file, and even if you record yourself via the microphone input you aren’t allowed to make a digital copy onto another meda (other than Sony-specific formats, naturally 
)
If you try, you get a big dialog telling you that you’re violating copyright restrictions.
(write your congressman, if you are in the country that foisted the Millennium Copyright Act and SCM on the world).
You can of course use the analog output to dub just like you could with the older MD formats, but from reading the official product literature you could get conned into thinking you could get (useful) digital data out of it.
caveat emptor
-Bill
Bill is quite correct. When I bought my Sony MZ-N707 Walkman MiniDisk recorder/player I was assured that I could record live and then store my recordings digitally on my PC via USB. This whole business of the recordings being locked up in Sony’s proprietary ATTRAC file format was not even hinted at.
So now I bring the MD home, plug it into the USB to use Sony’s software to control playback, and then run analog lines out of the MD into my soundcard to re-record my"digital" recordings. After being dinged $200 for the MD, I was not pleased. As usual, I regret having had anything to do with Sony. If you can find a unit by anybody else, I would suggest you direct your $$$s to them.
djm
Yep. Don’t buy anything from Sony if you can avoid it. They’re right bastards. I haven’t bought a Hi-MD yet, because i’m waiting for the hype cloud to disperse. I was pretty sure in the end the claims that you could transfer usable digital audio to the PC were false, and they seem to be.
I use standard minidisc from Sharp (MD 190), a beautiful little unit, and i found out that if i think of it as a very nice cassette recorder, it doesn’t piss me off. I use that when i’m going to record for long periods and/or want more control over the recording process. If you can think of the Hi-MD recorder as a very nice cassetter recorder with even longer recording times, maybe it would be a good unit to have. But expect to have to transfer your recordings to the computer via analog audio. It may be worth waiting to see if other manufactures will pick up on the format. Sharp usually makes better units than Sony. And if nobody else picks up, there’s nothing holding Sony from dropping it too, and leaving you with useless hardware.
I bought an old MP3 recorder (old = maybe 2 years old?) from Eskin, and i use that when i want to make quick recordings of tunes, etc, but i find it’s not as nice to use as the minidisc.
I think the future is in units with hard disk, like the iRiver and the Zen. But i wouldn’t invest a lot of money on these until the user interfaces become a little nicer. And i definitely would look for something with 40GB or more of disk, and able to record in WAV format. Look for OGG and FLAC also, if possible. MP3 is a dead-end proprietary format, that will be with us for a long time, but isn’t necessary the best thing. Oh, and avoid Microsoft formats as the plague. That’s just my humble opinion, but we don’t want to escape from Sony’s clutches to fall into Microsoft’s.
g
Gentlemen, many thanks for your comments and suggestions. Now I have to figure it out for myself. Best to all.
bump
How about this new mp3 recorder from Yamaha:
Looks like a very useful device…
Eskin, this looks pretty good – price and features. Would you know if it accepts an external mic or would I have to rely on the built in one? Thanks again.
That looks really cool. Hopefully it can take more than 32MB of memory.
No specs in that page and i’m too tired to search for them now but you can see built in microphones and speakers in this picture:
It’s SmartMedia based, so you can use up to 128 MB cards. The media is dirt cheap these days.
I believe that it has a 1/4" phone jack input for guitars, microphones, etc.