USB Audio Recorders?

arunmehta asks: "We're setting up short-range mono FM radio stations in Indian villages. We're currently recommending minidisk recorders to tape and edit (mostly voice) -- does anyone have a better idea? In some stations, we will also implement radio-surfing, so there will be a PC available, and so would like some USB-type connectivity that allows bidirectional transfer of digital audio at speeds higher than real-time. Suggestions for a recorder?"

Comments

Higher than realtime?

[ZeroLogic]

Is that possible? That sort of sounds like time travel to me.

Re:Higher than realtime?

[dodald]

It does not say they are editing LIVE feeds, what (I assume) they need is a method of transfering sound data faste the 1x. In other words it can't take 10 minute to transport 10 minutes of audio.

What's wrong with audiotape?

[PD]

Why does a little bitty radio station need a computer?

list of devices....

[ubiquitin]

For Mac users, the Griffin Powerwave has the following features:
RCA input and outputs, 1/8" inputs and outputs, built in USB hub and DSP, digital audio amplifier.

Wintel folks will want to check out the Telex device. Edirol UA-1A (44.1 kHz only), Edirol UA-3, GriffiniMic, Opcode DAT-/SonicPort (optical), Onkyo MSE-U33(HB), Onkyo SE-U55 and Roland-ED UA-30.

How many of these have drivers for Linux is anybody's guess.

Re:list of devices....

[D.A. Zollinger]

Oh, so I guess this isn't what you are looking for. ;)

RTFA!

[fm6]

Read the fucking article!

Re:RTFA!

[PD]

I did RTFA.

And to emphatically emphasize...

Why the FUCK do you need to use a minidisk? Why the FUCK won't tape work just fine?

Ask youself...

[fm6]

... how are these radio stations different from the kind you listen to. Then you know why they want digital media.

Re:Ask youself...

[PD]

All I did was ask a simple question. I don't know about radio stations. That's why I asked the questions. So I ask myself what you suggested, and I get the answer: I don't know.

That's why I asked the question!

I find it strange that I was marked up insightful, because I don't know a damn thing about radio stations.

Re:Ask youself...

[fm6]

I find it strange that I was marked up insightful, because I don't know a damn thing about radio stations.

Probably the same moderator who marked me "offtopic". I might have understood "flamebait"...

OK, having spent this much time, I might as well explain why these guys need something more flexible than tape recorders.. These are not pre-programmed stations. There's no centeral person (a DJ or a news producer or whatever) deciding what should go out. There's two-way communication going on here -- the system is a kind of ulta-low-bandwidith web browser.

Extremely poor rural people will use this system to retrieve valuable information -- crop prices, weather reports, what have you -- from the internet. They can't use conventional internet access because there's no rural network infrastructure in India, because these users couldn't afford to access it if there were, and because the info is mostly unavailable in the local language. (India has something like 800 local dialects.) So they're retrieving and translating internet info as people request it.

Maybe this project was more comprehensible to me because of I've read about other south-asian internet access projects, and because I know something of the practical difficulties of translating huge gobs of text. Still, I think the web sites linked to did a pretty good job of explaining what the project is about.

Good GOD, why does this need high-tech?

[hatless]

Why does a local radio station need computer connectivity and minidisks? What on earth is wrong with a cheap AM or shortwave transmitter? And what's wrong with analog audio cassettes? Apart from the power source for the transmitter (and AM and shortwave draw a whole lot less power than FM), this equipment should cost maybe $50 per station, including an old microphone and 2-channel mixing board. And the equipment for such a station can be fixed by anyone, using salvaged parts.

And as for using it to read internet content, how is this village connecting to the internet? If they've got reasonable phones, I guess you could do ftp-by-mail and fetch it overnight by UUCP on a 386. Surely realtime web surfing is an expensive pipe dream in these places. Why on earth is a serious computer with USB at all necessary? In a village where a modern (say, Pentium) computer could be put to much much better use, like public e-mail, research, weather and agricultural data analysis and so forth, setting up a needlessly fancy computerized local radio station is idiocy.

What part of reading news and information that (in a remote village in the developing world) will almost certainly come delayed in the form of text email requires a computer hooked to the radio station?

Can't someone just print stuff out from the village computer (on a reliable, unglamorous, and cheap-to-supply-with-ink dot-matrix printer) and read it on the air on an AM/shortwave station with ten times the range running on a tenth the power of FM? And if they've got to record it for rebroadcast or something, what's wrong with a cheap mono cassette boombox from a backpacker's duffel bag?

My god, have aid agencies gone insane?

Not a very specific..

[Zarquon]

Most audio equipment transfers at 1:1, as I'm sure you've noticed. I went shopping for portable audio recording equipment, and ended up with a Roland/Edirol UA-5.

I already had a laptop and plenty of drive space, and the UA-5 has some very nice preamps and ADCs for the price, as well as being quite small and tough. 24/96 for a very reasonable price.

If you do go this route, I'd recommend one of the modified units, or a competitor, that has simulaneous digital outs when recording for backup to another medium, such as DAT.

Minidiscs were out, because of the short record time at higher quality, and the lack of digital outs short of the large home decks. The size/battery life were nice, but the DRM lost them a customer.

There is a lively laptop-taping group at yahoo groups.

You may be interested in the newer HD-based MP3 players.. Nomad Jukebox 3 has a 20-gig drive, and an optical input, and can record to mp3 or wave, as well as an analog in, and supports firewire for fast transfers. I've never used one, so YMMV. It claims 22 hours battery life with a second battery, but I'd take that with an external battery pack (salt not required).

Or for lower-quality, but cheap and portable, look at dictation tape machines, as you mentioned voice content. Many can 'squeal' at higher rates, and you can correct for this by adjusting your sample rate.

There are much higher-end units out there, but they don't seem ideal for rough field conditions, and are overkill for a short-range mono station.

MiniDisc et al

[stinkydog]

MiniDisc is an excellent format for Amatuer-Semi Pro Use in this capicity. Some of Sony's new portables have usb built in and transfer at least 4x. Most recorders have optical ins, which when combined with the appropriate out allow you to fill a disc at 1x without interaction. I have used MD for years as a theatrical sound designer and I can not say enough good things about it. I build my shows on the pc and burn them to minidisc so that I can edit on the spot.

SD

Re:MiniDisc et al

[Zarquon]

Yeah... but it's 4x _to_ the unit, unless the hackers have fixed it since I last looked.. they were talking about transferring it to the pc at better than 1:1 for editting, for which Minidisc-based systems seem singularly crippled.

Research on USB digital recorders

[Futurepower(R)]

I did days of research on USB digital recorders. I came to the conclusion that the Sony ICD-BP100 (now ICD-BP150) was the best. It is very expensive, $150.00. It does not have Windows XP certified drivers, which means that it crashes Windows XP when trying to hibernate if the unit is plugged in.

However, the sound quality is excellent. There is provision to save to .WAV files, as well as other formats. Recording is independent of the computer, as it playing back.

Recording directly to a computer doesn't work well, because of the intense radio frequency interference associated with the fast components inside the computer. USB microphones may help with this, but they are half the price of a digital recorder.

Re:Research on USB digital recorders

[TummyX]

It does not have Windows XP certified drivers, which means that it crashes Windows XP when trying to hibernate if the unit is plugged in


Well actually, Windows XP disables hibernation support if any legacy drivers are installed.

Perhaps ...

[JDALaRose]

Perhaps it would be useful if the question were taken simply at face value and answered without needlessly questioning the premise of the question.

I'm guessing that those who are ripping apart this fellow's need for the things he asks for are not development specialists (economic development, that is), and I'm guessing that they don't have a great deal of experience in India specifically. The debate they have sparked is dilatory.

Sony MZ-N1 records at 32X realtime

[bindster]

Sony's MZ-N1 Minidisc Recorder might be what you're looking for. I have one and I love it. It can record audio data coming through the USB port of a computer at 32X realtime while in MDLP4 mode(which means that one regular 74 minute MD lasts 4 times as long).
MDLP4 sounds indistuingishable from MP3 audio, but if that's not good enough, MDLP2 touts speeds of 16X and regular recording (highest quality) records at 8X. It can also upload just as fast, and even though you currently have to import it from Japan, the software installs itself in English.

Avoid Minidisks

[Gerv]

I worked at a radio station in Oxford, UK, for a couple of years. We had Minidisk gear, and we found that all of it (but particularly portable players) was fragile, and prone to breakdown and failure at awkward moments.

We used it because there was nothing better; but in the environment you are talking about, this is definitely not appropriate technology.

Gerv

Midiman Quattro

[kfs27]

the midiman quattro is a good USB digital audio device...not faster than real time, but then again the question didn't make much sense.

http://midiman.com/products/m-audio/quattro.php

What is wrong with MPG?

[jhines]

Take your audio stream, and encode it down, then it will transfer in no time at all.

even at 50Kb (modem speed) its not going to take more than a few minutes to download an hours worth of spoken voice.

If you setup an ftp site, it would make archives readily availble in the future.

Still unclear on why tape recorders are no good

[hatless]

I'm still not clear where digital audio comes into this. Is this data requested for broadcast being read aloud and digitized by a central team and being e-mailed out to the villages? It sounded more like text was being sent to the villages.

Even so, I still don't see why faster-than-realtime dubbing is at all important to something like this, or why unreliable, developing-world internet connectivity (read: slow modems doing UUCP or such) is seen as a good way to move audio around, even 8 kbit/sec low-quality audio. Wouldn't broadcasting the audio via ham radio on a regular schedule be much cheaper and more reliable? To fetch the appropriate audio for a given village in order to rebroadcast it, all you'd need is a cheap tape recorder, a cheap shortwave receiver with BFO, and.. well.. a lamp timer to start recording at that village's assigned time. No phone lines, no computers deployed in villages, and no $300 minidisc recorders that'll be broken within six months.

Need the ability to edit in locally-produced audio, too? Okay: give them a second cassette recorder, a couple of blank tapes and a dubbing cable.

This would cost a fraction as much as the computer/minidisk arrangement, be more reliable, more maintainable and more sustainable.

Less glamorous, I'll grant, and maybe it doesn't give IT people involved in the aid organization much to do, but imagine the warm fuzzy feeling you'll get when followup site inspections a few years down the road find equipment still in working order.

Am I missing some key thing that necessitates computers and digital media in each village?

Re:Still unclear on why tape recorders are no good

[fm6]

Wouldn't broadcasting the audio via ham radio on a regular schedule be much cheaper and more reliable?

I don't know about the relative cost of FM versus SW transmitters. But stop and think for a second: a consumer-grade SW receiver costs a minimum of $100. An FM receiver goes for maybe $5.

As for digital media: you keep assuming its much more expensive than R2R tape. I don't know much about broadcast quality sound systems, but I suspect this is not so. Consider the cost of replacing tape as it wears out, and the difficulty of repairing a tape recorder hundreds of miles from the nearest Radio Shack.

And for all we know, Sony is hoping to create a new market for MD players by subsidizing the whole project. This whole thread, which is just a series of second-guesses of a project we know little about, is just plain silly.

Re:Still unclear on why tape recorders are no good

[hatless]

1. Anyone handy with a knife and a screwdriver--and I mean anyone--can build an AM or shortwave transmitter with miles of range from a few dollars' worth of parts, and can do so for even less with salvaged parts. FM's not forbiddingly complex, but it does need bigger, more precisely measured antennas and bigger transformers, and a lot more juice.

2. Shortwave receivers are expensive in the United States. The receivers used in countries like India--espeically in remote parts of the country that aren't even served by FM--are cheap. Rural India is not the same as suburban Bangalore. As with western China, much of Siberia and much of Africa, where the population is either sparse or very poor, the short range, expensive equipment, and high power requirements of FM don't make much sense.

3. Who said anything about reel-to-reel tape? Who said anything about "professional-quality" audio? This is a community-radio project. They're broadcasting news, weather, and farming reports. For half a century, the world was more than happy with the sound quality of AM broadcasts. People even listened to music on it. Billions of people still do. Plain old consumer-grade cassette tape should be more than adequate for something like this. Minidisc media are expensive. The recorders and playback devices are expensive both to obtain and to repair. And they need repair a whole lot more often than a $20 cassette recorder. Not to mention training involved, and the relative vandalism and theft risks.

Radio journalists worked for many decades with plain cassette recorders, without even Dolby B. I think Indian villagers can, too, especially for broadcasting speech.

wow! we must be doing something wrong.

[blisspix]

Man, our public radio station must be doing really bad if little Indian villages have computers.

We have cassette and minidisc. and it took 8 months to convince our stingy finance director to let go of enough money to buy an MD recorder.

you do not need a computer for recording. It basically just replicates what the MD can do. I doubt that your people want to do complex editing.

put your money into microphones, codecs, and your transmitter.

No, it does not disable.

[Futurepower(R)]

No, it does not disable. Windows XP malfunctions.

The Sony doesn't use a legacy driver. It uses a driver that has not been approved by Microsoft.