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Professional, Portable, Live MP3 Encoding
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."
With wireless add-on capability, this could be an ideal tool for "man-in-the-field interviews", or perhaps the audio equivalent of live hidden webcams. Here's to the documented life!
I don't know who they are marketing this product towards but at a 128 kbps data rate, its kind of pointless. 128kbps is fine for MP3s, but if you want to get a good master copy of any music you need a much higher bit rate. Remember 128 kbps isn't as good as an audio CD, still better then tape mind you.
Maybe good for those live dead shows, but probably not, there is no RCA or Mic line in.
Just my 3 cents...
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).
I'm still holding out for Ogg Vorbis. Someday, somebody has to build a recorder and player in Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3.
And so it goes.
It seems rather odd that this unit, directed towards professional DJs, is lacking a digital input. Surely these professionals will have digital boards with digital outputs perfect for recording on this neat little unit. Even middle-of-the-road MiniDisc recorders often have digital input.
-Dan
unixpunx.org - punks, computers, intelligence
Here is an interesting new digital music player. Actually it's a player/recorder targeted to professionals or anyone else who wants to record voice and music on the fly digitally.
I can see this being a cool little device for the every day person, but as an MP3 format recorder at a max of 128 kps, with only 256MB memory (will increase soon), I just don't see professionals switching from traditional media to this recorder any time soon, not even for their live performances. I think until a higher end format is used, such as Ogg Vorbis, these people will continue using analog recording media and if they need to transmit it digitally, they'll just use an encoder of some type back at the studio. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a cool little gadget for the average user, I'd like to play with one.
~ now you know
I doubt that will ever happen, as no one outside of computer geeks and wannabe computer geeks has heard of ogg. don't believe me?, walk around your average college student union, and ask the student populace (perhaps the people who use mp3 the most) about ogg. "ogg? what's an 'ogg'?"
my pet machine
Question: What's the advantage to this MP3 recorder over a minidisc recorder?
I know both recorders use types of compression, but wouldn't your standard MD player offer better overall quality?
(DAT would obviously be better, but I'm trying to figure out why anyone would use this thing over an MD recorder and a decent mic.)
This isn't meant to be a flame or a troll -- I'm curious. I realize MD is limited to the amount of time on an MD tape, but I've used MD to record a lot of Dylan concerts, and always -- almost always, at least -- the sound is superb. The few times the sound hasn't been superb has been my own fault -- cheap mic, bad seating, etc.
Sony MZ-R900 Comparing with Orban Sountainer 1. Cheaper media 2. Max playback/record/recharge time: 53 / 19 / 3.5 hours 3. Dimensions: 80 (W) x 20.5 (H) x 75.5 (D) mm 4. Weight: 135g (including NiMH battery) I don't sea how Orban Sountainer can compete with usual MD recorder in a field it was targeted.
128k is more than enough for live recordings, considering background noise, proximity of the source of the recording (loud speakers, etc)
anything over 128 is overkill... it just depends on how well it records in the first place.
I chalenge even "golden ears" to tell me the difference in a 256 rate Megadeth concert and a 128 rate one...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
why would I record anything I gave a damn about in a proprietary codec? For that matter why could I record to a lossy format? As a musician I'm dying for portable, one-piece, handy digital recording devices I can plug a mic into and use in the field, but not to make low-bitrate recordings in MP3.
Finally, that sultry CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour can encode her reports and put them up on Gnutella via satellite connection as soon as she gets back to her run-down Kabul hotel! YES! Suck on that, Fox News! :)
Learn to Play Go
If I were a "pro" in the audio field, I would consider it worth the time of the Dylan concert to have a higher fidelity DAT (or MD) copy of the concert vs. a fairly instantanious transfer. Especially with the Dylan example. It's hard enough to decipher his slurred lyrics in hi-fi vs. lossy compression!
I've been looking for some kind of little handheld thing i can slip in a pocket or backpack and use for random field recordings, and this may be what i've been looking for for some time.. i'm not happy about the whole "128 kbps max" thing, and it would be convenient if there were an integrated mic (although i guess i could find a mic that would just clip on).. but still. That's handy. I wish there were pricing information available.. it'll probably be out of my budget, but if it's less than a few hundred dollars, or at least under the rediculous prices you seem to have to pay to get any kind of working portable DAT tape recorder, i want one..
.. daydream 2), i guess..
A random thought: something i've been wishfully daydreaming about for some time is the idea of rigging an iPod to work like one of these-- get some kind of USB-firewire bridge and then hook up a USB microphone, then abuse the iPod's upgradeable firmware feature to add the ability to read in AIFFs to the iPod's hard drive. You could maybe even add the ability to have the iPod go back and encode the recorded AIFFs sitting around into mp3s to conserve space.. This may or may not be possible (i don't know how flexible/hackable the iPod is-- i believe it has an ARM chip though, doesn't it? that should be able to do just about whatever you like, no?) and it would require reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware, which would not be fun and definitely not be something i'm capable of (though someone out there is almost certainly already trying to do exactly that, at least for the purpose of A) adding some more games to complement the built-in breakout easter egg, TI-83 style or B) adding ogg vorbis support), but it's a lovely thought.
I have this mental image of someday some company creating a little slip-on chassis for the ipod that hooks into the firewire port and contains a firewire mic, then contracting with apple to create a legitimate version of the hacked firmware described above.. i know that will never happen, but that would be basically the most perfect piece of equipment possible for my needs..
Ahh, if only professional (read: no "copy protection" bullshit) DAT tape recorders weren't so expensive.. (i can't find any for under $700. Am i maybe just not looking hard enough?
Bleh. Well, back to my daydreams (daydream 1
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Hmm ...
... or even better, if this thing had *802.11b*, then we could all just record the gig with the thing in our pocket.
... walk away from that gig with a good recording, which you paid for with the price of admission.
...
Not sure I like the idea of using MP3 for sample recording (lossy), but it would be really, really sweet for recording live acts.
As a musician, and as a music lover, I'd really like to see live acts offering outputs from the mix desk
Betcha any money we'll see that within the next 2 years
Beat *that*, RIAA
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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?
Another reason why this is definitely not a professional device: the microphone connection is a stereo 3.5mm jack. I would expect to see at least a 1/4" balanced jack per channl, ideally XLRs with phantom power.
There are better alternatives out there:
And, in the Vaporware corner, the Shine MP3 Recorder for Handspring Visor!
(this is not a
since when is "tape" CD Quality? most reporters and concert bootleggers use a cassette tape to record their information...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
One of the Nokia 5510's multitude of bangs and whistles is that it's not only an MP3 player but a recorder as well, from the inbuilt radio or line in. 64Mb should be plenty for a couple of hours of recording. There's a rumour that it can also be used as a phone as well.
I just got off the phone with the U.S. distributor (Harris Broadcast) for Orban. The Sountainer (great name guys) will be available in April at an MSRP of $475. The distributor said that Orban is still tweaking the design.
This was developed by Dialog4, which was purchased by Orban last week.
Also, for the folks who are whining about bitrate, please note that the primary market for this is the broadcast industry, for field recording use. "Field recording" means a single mic pointed at someone's face or perhaps a stage performance, not a multi-mic studio mixdown. 128 kbps is more than adequate for this, especially when you consider that the broadcast medium (e.g. FM radio) usually ends up being the quality bottleneck (spectral bandwidth, stereo separation, etc.).
One simple rule for its versus it's
There are two things this might be useful for:
;)
1) Really crappy bootleg recording. It's the intended use, sure. But nobody with any experience or sense will use it for that.
2) College students who want to take notes. With the 32kbit rate, it would be great for recording long lectures.
In light of those two uses, I see the primary market being college students who maybe think they can be bootleggers on the side. It's not the world's biggest market, bu never understimate the willingness of people my age to spend money on (almost) useless crap
± 29 dB
Aside from it's horribly low bitrate and low capacity, this thing sports neither balanced inputs nor phantom power for condenser mics. On the upside, the mic input is low impedance, but I don't know where to find unbalanced low-z mics. That means you need a bulky transformer/XLR adapter at the recorder... The adapters to use this thing are bigger than the device itself. What sort of pro would use this? Possibly the same pro that uses Peavy equipment ;)... This is useless in the pro field, but could possibly be useful to the garage band scene to send in demo mp3s to a record company (who'll either sign them up or kick them in the nuts... wait, I'm repeating myself). Could a garage band afford this? Maybe, but probably not. This thing would be more useful for reporters, but it's lacking a phone input for taping phone interviews, and a limiter for compressing the dynamic range. Almost has a market, but not quite.
Try the Archos jukebox recorder It has a 6 Gig drive in it, batteries last for ~10 hours, records directly to mp3. Has USB and works with linux. What more could you want? There's also a 20 Gig version. Url here
2. Most line input levels from broadcast equipment is at +4 or +8 dB, while we do -20 to 0 dB.
3. The majority of professional equipment is going to need an XLR, 1/4" stereo, or TT to the consumer size mini-stereo plug adapter. This is not easily made in the field.
4. Most artists don't know jack about input/output line levels or how to make a cable that interfaces with their mix of consumer and broadcast equipment.
Note to self: Hire an audio/broadcast engineer to work on the development team.
How about more battery life to go with the excessive hard drive? Unless I'm on assignment somewhere in which I don't have access to a computer, 256MB is plenty of space. Did you think about batteries? The Archos doesn't use ordinary alkalines, do you want to carry the AC adapter to finish filling the HD? The new mp3 recorder is tiny: 62 x 110 x 24 mm, and incredibly light: Weight 140 g (incl. 2 AA Batteries). So which would you pick mister journalist?
They showed me this at NAB last April. This company actually has a pretty good product offering for using MP3 for radio remotes. ISDN is very common in Europe, and you can do a better-than-FM broadcast quality remote over a single ISDN line if you have realtime MP3 codecs. This is aimed squarely at journalists, and despite what the whiners in the audience may think, 128kbps MP3 is better than FM broadcast by a good stretch.
If they'd actually ship it, it might be worthwhile.
And let me say this again:
No fixed-point, No OGG. Deal with it.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
The company used to be owned by Harman Int'l and was part of their broadcast group. They made equipment for radio and TV stations. They did not try to sell into the pro audio market, nor the consumer audio market. Harman has plenty of other companies which specialize in these other (and very different) fields, and they didn't want Orban products competing with Lexicon products competing with Harman/Kardon products.
Orban has since been sold. It is still primarily in the broadcast audio field, so its focus is still on the radio and TV markets, but it no longer has this specific incentive not to compete in other fields.
Here's what I think happenned: Soundtainer is really nothing more than a really snazzy device for recording voice only in the field in two situations 1) recording voice with the intention of transcribing what is said to text, and 2) recording voice with the intention of broadcasting to a medium (AM/FM) which is already so compressed that the low quality makes very little difference. Orban decided, "hey, as long as we are selling this MP3 recorder to the broadcast market, let's try to sell it to musicians and consumers." This is not something that would have happenned in the old days under Harman, when Orban had a strict market identity and a parent company to enforce it.
In my opinion, Orban is probably going after markets which it should stay out of, but it is doing it with the idea that it is a freebie, since they have this device to market to whomever they please. But marketing to musicians and consumers is a totally different beast than marketing to a corporate community (the broadcast industry), and I think they may find that it is more than they can deal with.
So, having sort of justified the existence of this thing, I will also say that, since one of its primary uses would be for transcription, they should have built in a crappy mic. The built in mic would also make it more palatable to consumers who just want to record their children's first words, etc.; however, this was originally designed as a broadcast oriented device, and most reporters would prefer to use a lapel mic over a built in anyway (or a hand-held for interviews).
It would be really neat if it were a device suitable for use by professional musicians, but it appears that it really was not designed for that purpose, it is just being marketed that way to make an extra buck (which will probably be immediately lost due to the costs of setting up consumer support - keep in mind, Orban is used to selling their equipment to companies, not people).
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
And it could support Ogg Vorbis if someone had the time to port it to the 160MHz TMS320C5416 DSP that we are using.
Brian Lane
Lead Programmer
Shine Micro
Home of the SM2496 Visor module.
Remember Lexington Green!
Why Ogg?
Ah.. about that 'low quality' quip...
Provide me with any reported double-blind aural analysis between MP3 and OGG that shows MP3 as the winner. So far, I have only seen reviews in favor of OGG. And in my own observations OGG does a fine job.
And so it goes.
Thanks for the tip. I thought the irony in my "moving parts" comment was obvious, but I guess not.
"Professional" and "MP3" do not go together.
I'll ditch my DAT decks when someone comes up with a working S/PDIF hard disk recorder.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Firewire and wav recording capability.
That's pretty much all it takes to blow DAT's and MD's out of the water.
**>>BELCH
Check out this article:
Unionized technicians at NPR rejected a contract offer Jan. 11 [2002] that would end longstanding rules governing who at the network can record audio on location, mix pieces for broadcast and perform other duties...NPR management proposed the contract to take advantage of new digital technology that renders analog tape machines obsolete and makes it easier for producers to finish taped reports. Technicians, some of whom spend an estimated 65 percent of their time mixing pieces, worry that the contract might make their jobs obsolete as well.
Tascam also has a portable MP3 encoder, aimed at live music recording. It's a little larger, but it also records at higher bitrates, has more inputs, and has a CF slot.
Assuming the MMC format of memory adjusts in price to match the other flash formats (CF, Smart-Media, etc.), the price will lag a bit but gradually become affordable. The real questions are whether the box can use bigger memory cards when they become available/affordable, or whether 256MB is the most it'll ever accept, and whether the software is flash-upgradable so you can do 192kbps or 256kbps once you can afford the extra memory, or whether you'll decide that 18-bit A/D converters aren't good enough to bother encoding at higher speeds.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He said that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference for a Megadeth concert. He's not talking about the New York Philharmonic here, or Pavarotti, or even a live Phish show. He's talking about stuff that was megadistorted *before* recording, where the real issue is how much volume you can get during playback and how much beer you've got around...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Funny, I am a journalist and I use the Archos. It is everything you say it isn't.