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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?"
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?
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.