My new best friend

By Jason Meserve, NetworkWorld.com, 05/10/05

I made a new best friend during my trip to Las Vegas to cover Interop: The iRiver iFP-890 MP3 player. No, not because it helped entertain me on the 4.5-hour flights to and from the show, but for its built-in MP3 recorder and line-in port. Part of my job is to record some of the sessions that Network World contributors participate in (see Survivor Las Vegas). Usually, that involves pulling out my laptop, getting it booted up (it's Win2k, so that takes a while) and then using the Windows Media Encoder live encode feature to grab the audio on the fly. This time, I just popped a line from the in-room mixer to the iRiver, hit power then record and away I went. Set up time was under a minute. The iRiver I used comes with 256M bytes of memory, capable of recording just over 4 hours of 128K bit/sec MP3 files. After, I just use the iRiver manager software to drag the files on to my machine and transcode them from iRiver's proprietary .REC format to MP3 (this is a very quick process.) Then I could do anything I want with the files using SoundForge.

Also, we try to interview people on the show floor for our Radio segments. In the past we've used a tape recorder or MiniDisc recorder. Not anymore. I just popped my Audio-Technica ATR55 battey-powered mic into the line-in, switched the iRiver from line-in to external mic mode, and recorded away. (I admit, there are probably better microphone options out there for this task, but it's all I had.) The iRiver has a built-in Automatic Gain Control as well to help set the sound levels. You can also do this manually, but that's difficult to do mid-recording.

All the audio (except the intro music) from the two Radio programs we did last week was recorded on the iRiver. In addition to Survivor Las Vegas, we have three other sessions that we'll be posting in the next couple days (have to sync some slide decks to the audio). Everything captured with a $100 MP3 device. Very slick.

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