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Professional, Portable, Live MP3 Encoding

Posted by timothy on from the frauenhofferism dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Developed by DIALOG4/ORBAN the unit is called the Sountainer, a fliptop portable about the dimensions of a cell phone. Emphasized as an audio field recorder, the unit was designed for broadcasters, journalists, and artists who wish to record a live feed of their performance off the mixing board."

2 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Professional ??? by Hougaard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How can you call something professional with these limitations:

    1. Max 128kbps recording
    2. Max 256 MB memory using MMC.
    3. No option for recording MP2 (lossless)

    But it is nice to have portable MP3 recorders and I wish that someone would create a good unit for doing that. Right now, most recording is done with protable DATs (and sometimes mididiscs) or with a laptop with a good sound device (M-Audio or Emagic comes to mind).

  2. Yuck by yoink! · · Score: 5, Insightful


    ALGORITHM

    ISO/MPEG1 Audio Layer III (MP3)

    DATA RATES

    32, 64, 96, 128 kbps

    AUDIO MODES

    Mono, Stereo

    SAMPLE FREQUENCIES

    16, 32, 44.1, 48 kHz

    MICROPHONE AUDIO INPUT

    Input Level: Adjustable -60 to -40 dBu

    Impedance: unbalanced 600 ohms

    A/D Conversion: 18-bit.

    Connector: 3.5mm Stereo Mini-Jack



    It's strange that companies can try to find such outlandish uses for such useless devices. This device, if it is inexpensive, migh be alright for sound design students who want a quick copy to review their work in live arenas but seriously, Minidisc players are widely available, and include a TOSlink interface, alowing for recording and playback without using cheap A/D and D/A converters typically found in consumer audio gear. With the wide availablitiy of Sony's Portable DAT walkmans, ( not to mention the zip drive size of Tascams professional DAT recorders), and the increasing number of main-mix-down digital outs on live sound boards, what we see here is a chunk of plastic barely ready for use by anyone other than a highschool journalist with a cheap microphone. Luckily a lot of the well thought-out live venues will include some sort of stereo or multrack device for capturing any performance.

    It astounds me still that as soon as a company marks "professional" on a box that some people continue to assume that such devices really work better, or worse, are better than others. From the already mentioned-above point of low-bitrate encoding, lack of information on which (and I think those of you who compile a lot of mp3s would find this very important) on which CODEC is used. Add to that relatively skimpy 18 bit converters, and thin 3.5" jacks, and we're off to a wonderful start. Heck, if this is how we're going to start recording anything, why didn't we just stick with analog tapes. They're cheaper than flash memory cards.

    And aren't we tired of reading about the company to come up with the latest, lightly modified MP3 player anyway?