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Professional-Grade Audio Recording With A PDA
matt-fu writes "For a long time, live recording has been consigned mostly to the realm of DAT recorders, Minidisc recorders, or laptop computers. On one hand you have subpar sound quality, on the other you have a bulky rig with a big 'steal me' sign attached. Thanks to the folks at Core Sound though, mobile recording is about to take a huge leap forward with their PDAudio project. By using a hardware card that allows recording via S/PDIF onto Compact Flash, you will be able to use your iPaq or Zaurus alongside a decent A/D converter to portably get field recordings at up to 24bit/192kHz. The site includes WinCE screenshots, and there are Linux clients in the works as well."
Miss Cleo: I'm seeing high quality concert bootlegs in the future, along with a good chance of RIAA lawsuits. Be prepared as the death card is also in your future.
Now we can expect a special music piracy tax on PDA's as well.
This is really cool, but there are good solutions (MiniDisc, etc.) already for audio recording. This may have advantages over them, but there is still a significant installed base out there which will make adoption slow.
Perhaps a video version of this could be developed, holding DV video? One of the difficulties of Mini-DV, just as DAT, is its linearity, which makes editing a chore. Combined with the LCD display on the PDA, a DV version of this tech could enable basic editing on the fly. It could do for video what MiniDisc did for audio.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
How many great concerts have disappeared into the ether because no one recorded them?
A LOT!
And artists - if you are concerned that pir8's will swipe all your material remember that piracy makes the pie bigger and the bigger the pie the bigger your slice, and that the Grateful dead encouraged this sort of thing and they had the second most lucrative tour after U2 and that the pir8s are in fact working for you for free - all you have to do is grab their best stuff and publish it yourself ala Zappa in Beat the Boots.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
With this, and cell phones the size of postage stamps that can stream live video, we are reaching a point where people are going to have to assume they are being recorded or filmed at all times.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
have an "I'm bootlegging this concert" sign attached instead?
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
I wonder if they're going to include some form of lossless compression (like flac) on the sound to squeeze more bits out of the 4GB CF card mentioned in the article. As it stand, you can only get about an hour of uncompressed 2 channel 192 Kilosample 24 bit audio on there. With compression it should be easy to get 2 hours out of the card. If you use a lossy compression (like ogg) it should be trivial to get many many hours on a 4GB CF card.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is not an all-in-one solution. You'll still need an encoder, and frankly, a portable DAT or MD recorder is: smaller; a single finished piece; designed specifically for this purpose; and (at least in the case of the MD recorder) much cheaper than a iPaq/A-D converter/this funky card.
I can do pretty much the same with my Archos Jukebox Recorder and an amplified microphone. With on-the fly VBR MP3 encoding direct to a 20GB hard disc, space is not an issue. And it fits in a pocket.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
24kbits*192KHz*2channels = 1.152 MB a SECOND. If you compress it, then whats the point of having such high fidelity anyways? Your 512M CF card is going to hold 7 minutes of audio data.
Why not just buy a portable minidisc recorder, which is smaller than a PDA, cheaper than a PDA, would probably have 10 times the battery life of this PDA-based monster, and has media that costs $2 a pop? Add to that the media lasts for a 74 minute recording at a quality that will definitely blow that PDA solution out of the water and you've got a complete waste of time.
I can't understand why most geeks would lambast the general public for falling for the Megahertz Myth, and yet they get all starry eyed when someone starts throwing preposterous specs out at them. Do you honestly think that you can get an appreciable difference between 16/44 and 24/192 outside of a professional studio?
This product is targeted at clueless audiophile wannabes. Unless you are one, move along.
You can have SPDIF, DAT, you name it....but if the mic sucks....so will the audio
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
you'd only use one channel anyway. how could one person record two channels of audio at a concert in the crowd? they'd both sound the same
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
personally, I'd rather have a fully-digital device that can do 44.1/48 (which this can) and not have to deal with Minidisc, DAT's or anything at all that you have to transfer in real-time.
The potential is there though with this device, to work very well into the future as media gets cheaper and prices go down. 5 years ago, would you have assumed you could get a DVD-R for $2? 512MB of RAM for $50? 200gb of hard drive space for $150?
Of course not, with your thinking.
It's a shame so many people think that what exists now is the only thing that matters, and when someone shows you something that will likely be great a long time from now and is built with the expectation of advancement in technology, you say "bah, what is good now will always be good and who needs progress".
Yes, I Am An Audio Technician (IAAAT).
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Ummm... sorry to burst your pretty bubble, but 'professional grade' field recordings of concerts *can* be done with sub-$1000 microphones, well rigged to a portable system such as described here.
There's nothing that says "Pro = digital multitrack with multiple busses from the house mix".
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Actually, some mikes that are used in audience concert recordings have different cartridges to change the reception pattern of the mike (cardiod, hypercardiod, shotgun, etc ). Why? For better stereo seperation at different distances from the stage.
A good stereo audience recording sounds excellent. They really have that "there" feeling. I've actually jumped listening to a recording when a balloon popped near the mikes!
Some people have meantioned using minidisc for shows. I have never had a recording come from a minidisc. I've seen "tapers" use minidiscs, but there not considered tradable, they are for personal use only.
Regarding the recording of music on PDAs in general, I don't see this happening. There isn't a need. A minidisc is about as small as your gonna get, if size is what your after. Also, many of the current tapers have a dat deck, a good A/D converter, and some even have separate preamps to give gain from the mics to the a/d converter.
Trust me there are plennty of excellent recordings out there for many taper friendly bands. Many of the recordings have detailed lineage of the source. For example:
FOB B&K 4006 omni's (in hat, 36th row left of center) > Lunatec 316> Panasonic SV-250 by Marc Nutter; Transfer: Sony DTC-A6 > Dio 2448 > SF 4.5 @ 48K, Resample, add fades> CDWAV> SHN
This is from a recording 8 years ago, taping is almost godlike now!
For a long time, live recording has been consigned mostly to the realm of DAT recorders, Minidisc recorders, or laptop computers. On one hand you have subpar sound quality, on the other you have a bulky rig with a big 'steal me' sign attached.
Subpar sound quality? The DATs that I've worked with have better resolution than CDs (48 KHz vs 44.1 KHz sampling), minidiscs are technically CD quality, and laptop computers can be equally sensitive given the right equipment. Given what I've heard of PDA sound, there's nothing subpar about the existing recording mediums. Also, it's hard to claim that a minidisc is "a bulky rig".
By using a hardware card that allows recording via S/PDIF onto Compact Flash, you will be able to use your iPaq or Zaurus alongside a decent A/D converter to portably get field recordings at up to 24bit/192kHz.
So to record in this way, I must buy a "decent" A/D converter and a bunch of Compact Flash. And, unless they are using some compression which will lower the sound quality, this thing will suck up more MB-per-minute of audio than a CD. Good thing Hitchai (formerly IBM) makes their MicroDrive, and I have a money tree in my yard.
So, bottom line as I see it? An interesting project, but one which uses expensive hardware and media that makes it prohibitively expensive. So if you want professional digital recording, get a professional digital recorder. If you want ad-hoc "pro" sound recording from a PDA, now you've got an option.
(Of course, he did incorrectly suggest that lossless compression requires having the entire stream at once, which is patently incorrect. Obviously he's never heard of gzip or bzip2 -- both of which are lossless and compress streams block by block -- but aren't that great at compressing audio streams. There's more on various lossless audio-specific compression programs here.)
Note that even lossy compression is not always bad. mp3s and Oggs at 128Kbit/s may not be CD quality, but they're pretty good -- and yet it's compressed by a 12:1 factor! Increasing the bit rates will reduce your compression factor, but will increase the quality.
Jpeg files are lossy, yet with higher quality factors the quality is so high that you can't even tell the difference with your own eyes.
An audiophile may not be at all happy with 128Kbit/s mp3 files, but as you increase the bit rate, there's likely to be a place where he can't tell the difference between the lossy compression and the original. (Of course, depending on how strongly he hates lossy compression schemes, he may never actually admit it.)
At that point, what matters is the compression ratio compared to what you could get with a lossless compresser.
You wouldn't want to use a lossy compression scheme for compressing the studio masters (you should always do your mixing and such with no compression or lossless compression), but if the quality is good enough, it may be perfectly ok for the final distribution of the music, even for the audiophiles. 128 Kbit/s mp3s don't cut it, but that doesn't mean that `mp3 sucks!'.
You are not going to get 24 bits recordings of anything battery operated.
The level of precision recuired to even begin to approach 24 bits recuire very high biascurrents in the device.
Actual 24 bit conversion is actually extremely hard. I am not aware of any standard device capable of this level of precision at audio frequencies, let alone 200KHz.
Also you will not find any mic or concert venue enabling you to deliver 144dB dynamic range into the adc. You will likely actually get somwhere between 30-60dB
Note: Do not confuse the wordlength with the precision. There are many AD and DA devices who output a lot more bits than they actually can deliver data for. This is done to justify the audio-biz need for specmanship. (stick a '24' bit dac in there so we can write it on the front panel, never mind the device is propably only capable on 16-18 bits)
Generally condenser mics (such as the Rode NT series), are higher quality and will produce superior recordings.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I am a musician who records a lot of live performances, and I just bought a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3.. I'm really happy with it.. For about $375 you get a 40 GB hard drive, and it can record to WAV or several different MP3 formats via the analog or optical line in..
I tried the Sony Minidisc recorder, but was disappointed by the built-in DRM (you can't copy your own recordings to a PC digitally, because it doesn't think you have rights to them)..