Friends:
Imagine my surprise when I used the "sound recorder" on my new
touch-screen Sony 18 oz. Vista OS PC (VGN UX380N*) and it would only
save the file as a "WMA" file. What happened to the widely touted
"Microsoft victory" file, the "WAV"? Turns out that a WMA file is in
practice about 1/15th as big, so there may be some very lossy
compression going on. I wonder how it compares to other compression
methods, notably mp3?
Of course having admitted to all this I must suffer the traditional
slings and arrows of outraged professionals about fragile mini plugs,
generated heat, fan noise, electrical noise, control fragility etc.
Added to this I found no real practical record volume adjustment!
But in fact, the whole computer is so much lighter than my huge disc
recorder, I am trying it out with my ME-66 and ME-67 microphones, and
to my (somewhat deaf) ears they sound fine for moderately loud
natural sounds. Clearly one cannot listen on head phones during a
recording, and there is the fragility of a 30 gig HD to worry about,
but the computer fits in any of my four pants pockets, and is smaller
than a "Peterson" guide, weighs about the same. There is about 9 Gigs
of open space, plus 4 gigs per Memory Stick I put into its native
slot, which is a lot of recording time.
But how many field recorders permit you to email your captured sound
(or photo, it takes rather bad ones of those, too) immediately to a
friend? How many run Google Earth, or display four botanical guides
in Hi-Res color?
I do need to load onto it Cool Edit Pro (but currently lack an
external CD drive) to save and edit non-lossy WAV files. I actually
welcome other recommendations, comments, and the inevitable onslaught
of do's and don'ts --- ramifications of horror? :-D
-- best regards, Marty
Martin C. Michener, Ph.D.,
President, MIST Software Assoc. Inc., P. O. Box 269, Hollis, NH
03049 http://www.enjoybirds.com/
Faculty, Landscape Institute, Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA http://arboretum.harvard.edu/programs/ld/ld.html
*PS The next model, just out this week and still around $2300, VGN
UZ390N, replaces the HD with solid state memory. But both run their
fans a lot, requiring at least a longer mic cord..
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