ozpeter

The TapersSection forums have lots of user feedback on portable recording devices, some of which might be seen as alternatives to minidisc - http://taperssection.com/index.php/board,11.0.html Comparison chart can be found at http://www.wingfieldaudio.com/compare-port...-recorders.html

We had one of those little Behringers performing a submix role in our radio studio (alongside a Tascam digital desk and Grace preamps!) and it ran just fine for a year, often without being turned off at night. Then it was replaced in a rehash of the studio, not because of inadequacy or failure.

Sounds like you should check out the TapersSection forums at http://taperssection.com/index.php/board,11.0.html for some at least of those questions, Jason.

I have no idea why this discussion from four years ago has suddenly resurfaced! But the person who said was on the money as far as Total Recorder is concerned. For instance, it had the ability to record streaming audio from the net at full download speed, not just real time. However, wanting to get hold of the latest version (I have a licence) I've been unable to get into their site for a long time, and I assume the developers have disappeared - pity! [Edit - heh, I've just got into their site and I see in fact there is a new version available!]

Indeed they used to be cheaper, but I recall speculation that blanks were originally sold at a subsidised price to encourage sales of the recorders. Now I notice that SD cards are around the same price for a one gig capacity, so the "cheap media" advantage of Hi-MD seems to have gone.

http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/download/software/h2.php#c is where you can download an Centrance asio driver for the H2, enabling it to be used as a simple audio interface in DAW software like Cubase (they tested it) and Reaper (I tested it). So if you need that, don't sell the H2!

There's a new R 09 model about to be released. http://taperssection.com/index.php/topic,100541.0.html

Heh, that sounds exactly like a bug that Premiere Pro video editing software had at one point. Very nasty indeed!!

As I recall it, even the avid purchasers over at Taperssection haven't gone for that Swissonic model, on the grounds that it's too cheap for its own good.

Good points, chaps. Hey, my post read a bit hostile - not intended - I suspect I started the "rot" with posts about the Zoom H2, which I own and find many uses for - but when I go to record an important interview soon, it'll be my RH-1 that I'll take (OK, with the H2 as backup). I don't think we should pretend that alternatives to MD don't exist, and I do think a subforum is worthwhile, and I agree that perhaps the perspective here is different from the Taperssection people. I chiefly read there (and contribute, sometimes linking to here!) purely to keep in touch with what comes on the market. Their purchasing priorities do differ from mine - so I make my own mind up about what seems good and what seems not.

As I said months back, we need to consider whether these forums are going to morph into forums concerning all small recording devices or whether we'll stick to MD as the ship goes down. Anyone wanting to keep in touch with the slew of small recorder releases should (IMHO) be reading the Taperssection forums (heh, currently down at the moment as it happens) where discussion about the Olympus recorder have been going on for a couple of months or so, as memory serves me. Should we have a subforum here for non-MD devices perhaps? Or should we not bother but discuss elsewhere in existing relevant forums? The risk in discussing a few machines here is that people might think that the choice is limited to just those, whereas the choice is now very wide. Dunno... any views?

Well,some people are - others (me for instance) are writing high definition video to SDHC cards and uploading to PC at high speed. If I were Sony I'd be looking at putting an SDHC drive in the RH-1 and writing the files with no proprietary stuff, just like the other portable recorders do. The RH-1 differs from the rest of that pack by its smaller size and mini-desktop form factor. I'd bet it would sell quite well and most of the development and tooling has already been done.

Looking at the tests at http://www.avisoft.com/recordertests.htm I suspect that the mic input of the Tascam DR-1 will not sound anything like as quiet as the RH-1 - which seems to be bettered only by a few higher-end devices. However, I bought a couple of 1Gb SD cards yesterday - good quality SanDisk - and noticed that their price is now more or less the same as a 1Gb Hi-MD disk. So the last argument in favour of Hi-MD ("the media is much cheaper") has gone - unless of course you want a quiet mic input!

The place to read up on the many alternatives is the "TapersSection" forums at http://taperssection.com/index.php/board,11.0.html - the first thing to decide is how much you want to spend. Unlike the MD/Hi-MD products, software to download the recordings from other portable recorders is not an issue, as they record to standard file formats on removable media, or you can treat the device as a USB hard drive.

It's worth noting - and of course relevant in these forums! - that the RH-1 does seem to enjoy a good reputation on the naturerecordists newsgroup (for its low-noise preamp). Anyone considering what small recorder to purchase really should do some in-depth reading at http://taperssection.com/index.php/board,11.0.html where end users do put just about every possible such device through the mill - here the focus is of course much more MD/Hi-MD based, though many of us are now researching alternatives - sadly...

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/naturer...s/message/32018 "I received a sample Tascam DR-1 on Friday. I can't recommend it. The 3.5mm mic input and headphone output have poor electrical connections. If the mic cable or input jack is touched, static-like noise is added to the recording. The headphone jack had a similar noise problem when wiggled a bit. This is not a good sign after only 30 minutes' use!" But read the whole post as linked, plus subsequent comments.

Anyone wanting to keep track of developments in non-MD small recorders should be reading the forums at taperssection.com - lots of end-user comment and the latest news - I think the new M-Audio machine has been out for some months, and some problems have already been encountered (and fixed, at least some).

For more, see http://taperssection.com/index.php/topic,97231.0.html and http://tascam.com/products/dr-1;9,12,3594,14.html

Yeah ,that should work. But while having a general sympathy for the remarks about how cassettes were a whole lot easier, I'd suggest that if we were a little more familiar with using SD or SDHC cards, and then someone tried to get us to use cassettes instead, we'd laugh. For me, the SD card is rapidly becoming THE medium for many purposes - it goes in my H2, in my Panasonic hi-def camcorder, in my personal organiser, in my digital camera, in my laptop - and you only need a few, an assortment of capacities perhaps, and then you don't need any more. The data get transferred in seconds to a hard drive, or to a DVD or CD (takes a little longer of course) and they file away much more compactly than a cassette. Sorry, I've seen the future and it's SDHC-shaped!

I'm not sure how cost-effective the H2 is as an audio interface - I guess you have to take into account that it's got the mics built in - anyway, recording direct to a laptop then doing a quick drag and drop to CD burning software might be the go - hand them a CD 5 minutes later, either an audio one or an mp3 data one. That assumes you have a laptop. Of course you could untie the H2 from the PC and after recording, pop its card into the presumed SD card slot on the presumed laptop, and burn the CD from that.

Is it possible that with time, and perhaps slowing stock movements (boo hoo) batteries are deteriorating on the shelves before being sold?

I've had a Teac hard drive / CD player combo for a couple of years - such devices don't seem to have caught on, and the Teac one was sold off very cheaply in the end to get rid of stocks. I guess most people would prefer an iPod and plug it into their HiFi when required.

Pix of D50 against Hi-MD machines have been posted at http://taperssection.com/index.php/topic,9...html#msg1263368 - it looks rather large by comparison - but it looks "the business"....

You can store whatever you like on a Hi-MD disc as data. The discs should last for a great many years - but whether the rapidly disappearing players will remains to be seen. With the rapidly falling prices of hard drives, making multiple copies and refreshing them by copying those every few years (perhaps to whatever takes over from hard drives - terabytes of storage on a credit card??), or some such scheme, would probably be a better bet. I have hundreds of master tapes on DAT - the tapes are probably ok but only one of my machines seems happy to play any of them. And as the CDs made from the tapes have now largely disappeared from the shops anyway, who'd want to go back to the original takes anyway? But I can't quite bring myself to throw them away.

The Total Recorder site has been down for weeks - they are not responding to email - it looks like they may have gone belly-up, which would be sad. (If I knew they might do that I would have downloaded the latest version!).