Portable Digital Voice Recorders for a Singer?

Geek Singer asks: "I've had classical singing lessons for a while now and managed to advance to a level where hearing my own lessons is important for developing my skills. Here in Europe many singers use MiniDisc recorders. As a geek I think that MD recorders are DRM-encumbered, clumsy, slow and obsolete. Especially moving the recordings into my computer can get very troublesome due to nasty restrictions cast by Sony. For these reasons I need to have something else than a MD recorder. There are various portable MP3 players that have a voice recording capability, but I've found none that have all the properties I need: low price, good recording quality, line-in recording, excellent battery life, a good interface, support for Linux or Mac OS X and enough space for tens of hours of decent quality voice recordings or a slot for an exchangeable memory card. I've already checked numerous manufacturers including iRiver. Their players are great, except that the HD-models are too expensive and the flash-based models don't have a memory card slot. What portable digital voice recorders do you suggest?"

Comments

The downside of nearly every computer...

[rusty0101]

... is noise.

Yes there are silent pc's available. You can even find them with shielded sound cards. They are not going to be under $300 however, unless you want to build your own, including building your own shielding around that sound card. If you are using a PC with a hard drive, you have a power supply fan, the processor fan, the hard drive, and possibly both a video card fan and a bios fan that are all going to introduce background noise into your recordings.

Most laptops today have a fan in them, and I don't know anyone interested in computers today who would consider the internal microphone of a laptop for any recording beyond very rare sampling.

Before you suggest using an external mic and headphones, remember that there really isn't a laptop out there with a shielded audio system in it. As a result it is invariably going to pick up electrical noise from components within the computer.

The last option I would consider is a USB based sound system. Not because I don't trust the quality, but because of the fact that once you add the price of one to your computer, (laptop or otherwise) you could have picked up a profesional grade digital recorder, and been done with it.

One other thing to take into consideration is the 'setup' and 'teardown' time involved. If you go to a teacher, paying for a 50 min lesson, you are not going to want to spend a significant portion of those 50 min setting up a computer or laptop to start recording your lesson, and your instructor is not going to be pleased if your setup and teardown (especially if you are carrying around mics and stands) eats into some other student's lesson time. Likewise for practice rooms if you need to practice, and can not live with an electronic keyboard in your dorm, appartment or other living arangements.

If you do go with an MD recorder, and a mic, with an optical connection to a PC that allows you to transfer cleanly, I recomend pre-testing your equipment, or at least finding out if all will work within the return time of whomever you are buying the stuff from. My own MD recorder has a very hit or miss pattern with the various mics I have tried with it. At best I can recognize my voice with the volume cranked all the way up. Occasionally I may even be able to recognize what I was saying at the time. Fortunately I don't need to record with it, as I have other options available. (none of them direct to digital, but my erquirements are not as high.)

I wish you better luck.

-Rusty