Course materials © for/by Peter
L. Patrick.
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Comparison of Recording Media
Peter L. Patrick, Autumn 2009
Sociolinguistic Research
Methods
|
|
Microcass |
Cassette |
MiniDisc |
DAT |
Laptop |
Rec CD |
Flash |
|
Size |
√√ |
√ |
√√ |
√ |
xx |
x |
√√ |
|
Cost of Quality |
√ |
x |
√ |
x |
xx |
√ |
√ |
|
Quality |
xx |
√ |
√ |
√√ |
?/√/* |
√√ |
√√ |
|
Robust to use |
? |
√√ |
√ |
x |
x |
√ |
√√√ |
|
Robust medium |
? |
√√ |
? |
√√ |
x |
√? |
? |
|
Digital/Analog: |
A |
A |
D |
D |
D |
D |
D |
|
Archiving |
x |
√ |
? |
? |
? |
? |
? |
|
Degradation |
x |
x |
xx |
√ |
√? |
√ |
√ |
|
Compression |
√ |
√ |
xx |
√ |
√ |
√ |
√ |
* Quality of PC laptop sound generally depends on how much extra money
you are willing to spend on high-end components when you are first buying, or replacing/adding-on later. Most PC laptops, even
those designed for “media” (ie gaming and DVDs), have
mediocre sound quality that will not do – there is noise interference from
internal components. But there are exceptions... Both quality,
and cost of quality, depend too on how much you know about PCs and their
components.
The media listed above – indeed, this is generally true – don’t all use
the same formats for data. In the old days, this meant what your data were
“on”: wax cylinders, disks, magnetic tape of varying widths (eg cassettes vs reels), etc. Nowadays for digital data, it
means what kind of file format the
recording is in. Most digital file formats
were invented to sell you pre-recorded music, not to give high-quality
accessible audio for research. So many file formats are not ideal for our use.
You need to know just a bit about them, if you don’t already, and you can find
that bit here...
http://www.geeks.com/techtips/ttpdfs/TechTips-111.pdf
To convert from one audio format to
another, you’ll need software – look here for my recommendation, Audacity.
Recommendation: Go digital. It’s
not worth using anything analog (tape) anymore.
But
everything changes, every year! Here’s the last few years’ worth of changes in
what I recommend (Beware: obviously,
most of the older advice, prices, etc. are now outdated):
o
Five years ago,
I said:
1) Buy DAT for acoustic analysis
if you can afford it.
2) If not, & for everything else, buy MiniDisk. [see
note-1 at bottom!]
I’ve changed my mind
about (1). ...
o
Four years ago,
I said:
3) Forget DAT. Digital sound is now widely available – DAT technology is good
but becoming outdated.
4) The new Hi-MD
standard for MiniDisk
is a big improvement – you can find out all you ever wanted to know about it by
browsing thru user-group discussion lists, if they still exist. Beware:
techies!
·
Three years ago (autumn
2005), I said:
5) Buy a flash-card
solid-state recorder if you have the money
(£8-900!).
6) A portable
CD-recorder is slightly cheaper and also
very good, but not quite as small or as robust to use.
But for most people, you could still
7) Buy a HiMD Mini-disk recorder. They
were available from about £135 to £300, with very good models for £180 or so
(prices probably out of date).
·
Two years ago, I bought
myself
8) a
digital flash recorder: M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96, webpage here
o
It cost about £220 then;
o
It records 2 channels to
both MP3 and WAV formats, so ideal for our purposes;
o
You can drag & drop
files to your PC, it has decent battery life, and uses compact flashcard
storage.
o
There are other models
out there, but they generally cost as much or more and are not nearly as good.
·
Autumn 2009: This is still my choice, but there is a newer model, the MicroTrack II (UK site). It costs a mere £120 now and has been improved a bit.
If this is still too much for you, don't despair! The Dept. owns
several MicroTrack recorders and you can check one
out. Otherwise:
9) The cheapest pretty-good
digital sound is via MP3 and other inexpensive digital recorders aimed at the
recorded-music market. Compared to the above, they have serious drawbacks, but
you will spend less money. If you’re not serious about high quality, this is
the way to go. Pointers on what to look for (more detail below):
§
Make sure they are not just players! Ie, that they will record sound: check
for a Mic input channel. (Not just Line
In, which is an input for e.g. downloading
from your PC.)
§
Pay special attention to
the available audio file formats – .MP3
is one (compressed) format; uncompressed standard ones include .WAV (Windows) and .AIFF (Mac). More details on audio formats.
§
If you have a Line Out jack, that’s good too –
you will be able to export your digital sound to your PC. Otherwise, you would
have to do it through your Headphones output jack, which is not good quality.
Some of these recorders are very cheap indeed. If you can find a cheap
one that includes all the above features, buy it. There are hundreds of models
– I can’t really give more advice than this, but you can come see me in office
hours and I will try to explain this again, better!
It
often costs a
fair bit of money to get good sound. But then, your thesis or
dissertation costs a lot more – and is only as
good as the data you collect. Spend enough to get good equipment – you can
always play music on it! If you don’t spend a couple hundred quid, you will
only get mediocre sound quality. If you just don’t have any money, you can
arrange to borrow Dept. equipment – but you will have to share it with others,
and will miss a number of good opportunities because of not having your own
handy.
The basics: Minimally, any recording device must
be able to record! (that
sounds obvious, but some Mini-Disks or MP3s are for playback only, so be sure),
and accept an external microphone, whether
or not there is a built-in one, and have independent recording-level
control.
If
it’s digital, as it should be, you’re going to want to up-load your data into
your computer – for that, you need to have a dedicated Line-Out
channel (not just the Headphones channel, which puts out a very weak signal
since it’s only intended to drive tiny headphones speakers). It may also be
handy to have a Line-In too, if you want to
either download from PC or the net, or from other recording sources (e.g.
non-digital ones).
Do not
use a MD, or any other digital medium, in long-play mode – it simply further compresses, and
degrades, the recording signal. When copying sound
files, make copies from master to computer HD, then CD, to avoid further
degradation.
For microphones: Get a lavaliere (=tie-tac) model, preferably stereo,
since you may get several speakers and need to tell them apart. Shape of
recording area matters: omni-directional or cardioid
(heart-shaped) are OK. (Try out tabletop mics
from the Dept. to hear their characteristics; not recommended for many uses,
though. Do not buy a highly directional mic
that can “zero in” on a target.)
Any
external mic, at all, increases your chances of being
able to get good mic
placement, which is absolutely crucial to making good recordings.
Hand-held mics are very obtrusive, and so are
head-set mics, but both can give excellent results in
experimental settings; for casual speech, lavaliere mics,
or mics the size of your thumb or smaller, are the
best bet. The mic is the most important part of your
equipment – be prepared to spend enough to get a decent one.
More details: Feel free to consult with me during office hours about specific models,
before you buy. Do not trust what audio salespeople tell you. They have no clue
about recording speech! and are often poorly informed
about their own equipment. If you can buy outside of the
Note-1: The
Free,
and Not-so-Free, Audio Software
Finally, you may find it useful to step through their multi-part
free tutorial on Using CoolEdit Pro. This program is no
longer in existence, having been snapped up by Adobe and renamed Audition (price GB £300+!, and much glossier now). But it is pretty typical of
software for editing sound files, and extremely easy to use. This course gives
you an idea of the things you can and might want to do with such software, in
depth – also much better than Adobe’s own overview, though of course the
product has changed a bit by now. Adobe advertises it as being about working
with music files, but the Beeb used it for editing
radio interviews, and you can do a range of useful linguistic things with it or
a similar package. Other cheap, free- or share-ware includes GoldWave, which has been used by students a lot. It’s no
longer free but is pretty cheap, and you can use the evaluation version for
free for some purposes. http://www.goldwave.com/.
The kinds of
things you will want audio software for include recording,
editing, file-conversion, and uploading. You may e.g. want to use a program to
cut small bites out of an 80-minute file for further analysis.
My recommendation: A much better idea than GoldWave,
Audition or CoolEdit is to get Audacity, free. The software most
people use now is Audacity, an open-source package for recording and editing
sound. There’s a good wiki on it at: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/ and the homepage is at: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.
For all of
these, if you want to work with MP3 (I recommend you don’t, for linguistic
purposes – but hey, if all your music is in that format, you’ll want to use the
programs on that too), you’ll need a separate little program called LAME (it’s
better than its name) which is an MP3 encoder (MP3 is an audio file format, a
little piece of technology which is owned and copyrighted, so you can’t just
use any software to create it). Get LAME – download it, and install in the same
file folder as whatever software you use it with – find it here: http://lame.sourceforge.net/.
You’ll notice I
keep referring to tools at SourceForge.net. It’s the best general source of free
software for many of our needs. It is not remotely commercial, or knock-offs of commercial items – much of it is developed by
professionals, for research or other purposes, and put out open-source and free
for anyone to use. Explore http://sourceforge.net/.
LG554 Sociolinguistic Methods page
Last updated 19
October 2009