Which device for recording sessions?

bjs · Post by **bjs** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 1:09 pm

How about this one?

iRiver H10 6GB Colour HDD Player

Any other suggestions? Quality of recording/playback?

bjs · Post by **bjs** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 9:42 am

I got one. Thanks for the replies

It did everything I wanted but stopped working after a week. No response to one of the buttons. Amazon are sending me another one. Fingers crossed.

Mustafva · Post by **Mustafva** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 10:53 am

Is it good then? Do you use built-in microfon?

srt19170 · Post by **srt19170** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 11:37 am

Too late now, but you'd have been better off getting a device with a line-in input. That would give you the option of recording from an external microphone (or a sound board).

I recently went through the same exercise and ended up with an iAudio X5.

-- Scott

cpelsor · Post by **cpelsor** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 2:09 pm

I love my edirol R-09. Records at CD quality uncompressed, and I can swap out my SD memory as needed. Though a 2 gig card lasts longer than most sessions...

Cayden · Post by **Cayden** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 2:18 pm

Yes I finally decided to go with the R-09 as well. It's been in the hands of UPS for the past five or six days (coming from England) with a bit of luck they will manage to find me tomorrow and deliver it.

azw · Post by **azw** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 3:19 pm

What would one of the little mp3 player/recorders be like for recording tunes at a session?

Locally, I could buy either a Philips 1GB MP3 Player With Voice Recorder, or a Mach Speed Trio MP3 Player / Voice Recorder with 1 GB. Neither would cost more that $60-70.

I realize that something this cheap won't have great recording quality. What I'm wondering is whether they'd still be useful for learning a tune later?

BillChin · Post by **BillChin** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 8:02 pm

azw wrote:What would one of the little mp3 player/recorders be like for recording tunes at a session?

Locally, I could buy either a Philips 1GB MP3 Player With Voice Recorder, or a Mach Speed Trio MP3 Player / Voice Recorder with 1 GB. Neither would cost more that $60-70.

I realize that something this cheap won't have great recording quality. What I'm wondering is whether they'd still be useful for learning a tune later?

Yes, if the purpose is to learn tunes, low quality recordings are fine. I have an older Sony Voice recorder with tiny memory and relatively low sampling rate, and it works great for live fielding recording. For most venues for live recording the acoustics of the place and background noise will be more of a limiting factor than the sampling rate of the recording device.

The newer devices with CD sampling rate or better are fun toys, but not necessary for the average musician looking to record a few tunes live.

crookedtune · Post by **crookedtune** » Tue Oct 17, 2006 8:31 pm

I have my eye on an Olympus DS-2. Not quite the quality of the Edirol, but a whole lot cheaper. You can get one on eBay for about $75, and I've read lots of good things about 'em. (Of course I REALLY want a Burke brass narrow-bore D too!).

cpelsor · Post by **cpelsor** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 12:25 am

BillChin wrote: The newer devices with CD sampling rate or better are fun toys, but not necessary for the average musician looking to record a few tunes live.

Yeah, I should stipulate that I use my recorder for a lot of things other than just recording sessions.

For example, my 3 month old kid likes to fall asleep to the sound of water coming out a faucet. However, I find that running the faucet for a few hours a day incredibly wasteful. So I made a 1 hour CD of running water based on a 15 second sound clip recorded from the Edirol. The little guy can't tell the difference!

I also do a lot of sound work for the different interactive projects I do, so this is a nice addition to my sound toolbox.

At the same time, we do have a lot of odd musicians coming through from all over Europe, and it is nice to have good recordings of their special tunes.

azw · Post by **azw** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:37 am

Thanks for the ideas on the mp3 recorders.

I'm considering a SanDisk Sansa 2 Gig for about $80. I'm concerned about the durability of these things. It seems like a lot of them just stop working when they're only a few months old.

bjs · Post by **bjs** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:15 am

Strange. Suddenly this topic comes to light too late for me. I sent back the iriver yesterday and got another from amazon today. How's that for service? Bloody amazing. The H10 has a 2 year guarantee so I am happy to take the risk of another failure. For my money it does a great job of recording. Check out this

http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~bjs/Primrose-Lass.mp3

recording made of a tune we are learniing at the Coventry session. Yes I used the built in mike.

azw · Post by **azw** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 11:20 am

Thanks for the sound clip. That sounds pretty good! It must sample at a high rate.

I see that the I-River regularly gets panned for poor reliability and there are lots of refurbished units for sale on Amazon.com. Maybe poor durability is the tradeoff for buying something this powerful and complicated for so little money?

cpelsor · Post by **cpelsor** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 12:18 am

bjs wrote:recording made of a tune we are learniing at the Coventry session. Yes I used the built in mike.

Wow, that does sound great, all things considered. I always have to keep in mind that 99.9% of session recordings won't have the same sonic qualities as "Music at Matt Molloy's" for the simple reason that 99.9% of people don't have the financial backing of Peter Gabriel to wire up every room in a pub like it were its own recording studio for 2 weeks...

bjs · Post by **bjs** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:49 am

Please pm me if you go for the iriver10. It took me a while to get the firmware update installed.