Archive for the Audio Production Category

New Digital Audio Recorder

Audio is still a vital part of our daily lives, and high-quality recording is now an option to carry around in your pocket. The new Tascam DR100 Portable Digital Recorder looks exceptional for the serious amateur (church musician, college student, part-time videographer) to budding professional. I have an earlier Olympus model MA10, which I find very useful. But this new model is even easier and faster to use, has more features, and does almost everything I would ever want a portable device like this to do.

Features begin with not just two, but four built-in microphones. These can be configured for different applications. Or just start recording at up to 96KHz quality. Plus it has XLR microphone inputs (with phantom power) to use professional microphones when desired.

Excellent Digital Audio Tools

I’ll admit it, I’m a tech-geek. And I’m afraid I’m contributing to my son being one, as well. Yesterday I ordered a new portable digital audio recorder, having found a new model that has features to make it worth updating from my Aiwa minidisc recorder.

The new Olympus LS-10 digital recorder was released in the U.S. in January, and has built-in stereo microphones, 2GBOlympus LS-10 internal memory, and a SD/SDHC card slot. This new unit will make studio-quality recordings and fit in a shirt pocket. Hopefully my daughter can make some good recordings of her songs, and it will be useful for audio for video production and other applications.

Do you edit audio? The great thing about this recorder is that files are instantly transfered from the recorder by USB (or SD card) and ready to edit. I use Cool Edit Pro software, which Adobe purchased and updated to the newer product, Adobe Audition. I wish Audition were included with the Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (which I purchased for grad classes and for teaching). Instead, Adobe created a basic audio editor, called Adobe Soundbooth, to bundle with the Creative Suite video products. Eventually, I’ll probably update to the current version of Audition. For now, I’ll keep using CoolEdit. Or I’ll use Audacity, which is one of the best free programs available for audio editing.

Download Audacity and find other useful Open Source software at SourceForge.

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