Using a Pocket Audio Recorder with Linux?

Michael asks: "I'm in the market for one of those portable, pocket audio recorders, to use primarily for dictation and spoken-word recording in the field. Previously, I used microcassette for this purpose but it's time to go digital. My only two prerequisites are that it use SmartMedia cards (as with my digital camera), and write a file format that can be used with Linux. To my surprise, this is turning out to be a difficult request."

"The Olympus series of digital voice recorders seem to be the most popular hardware in this category, and they're cheap, but they write files in a proprietary DSS ("Digital Speech Standard") format that can't be converted under Linux. It looks like people have been wondering about this format for years, but as of today it remains inaccessible for free software users.

Solutions I've come up with are (1) to get a pocket MP3 player that can also record, like the MPIO DMG MP3 Player (expensive for my task, though, at $200); and (2) the handheld multi-track recorder, the Korg PXR-4. An ideal setup would have a headphone or speaker jack for playback, and a mic/line input so that it could be used to make digital recordings from another hardware source (like TV or radio), and used with special microphones like a parabolic mike."

Comments

The industry standard...

[jargonCCNA]

...as far as field digital audio recording goes in MiniDisc. Get yourself a half-decent MD player and a nice mic with a 1/8" jack and you're good to go.

Stick it

[fm6]

olutions I've come up with are (1) to get a pocket MP3 player that can also record, like the MPIO DMG MP3 Player (expensive for my task, though, at $200);

OK, two quibbles with that. First, if you're intent on going digital, you're going to have to accept that it's more expensive than analog technology. A lot more. If your budget is tight, stick with old-fashioned technology.

Second, just because an MP3 device happens to have a record function and a cheap built-in mic, doesn't mean it's a decent voice recorder. How good is the encoding firmware? What's the sampling rate? Is the mic a decent one that won't break down, or just some piece of crap they threw in to make the product more marketable?

As for Linux compatibility: Sony makes a couple of voice recorders that record to a memory stick. If you have a memory stick reader supported by Linux (there are several), you can mount the stick as a VFAT disk, and access the individual voice files directly. But that still leaves you with the problem of decoding Sony's proprietary LPEC format.

I'm not sure you can avoid the proprietary format problem, not if you want decent recording quality. Now, getting proprietary-format voice files into a standard format is a pain even under Windows. The problem is that vendors seem to like to embed the conversion software in the device driver -- which never seems to have been fully tested on all likely system configurations.

But in Sony devices, the conversion is embedded in a user-level playback program, which doesn't have all the low-level dependencies of a device driver. Possibly that program will run under Wine.