So I'm starting a psychological assessment class where it's necessary to record interviews. I used to own a microcassette recorder, from a long time ago in my student journalist days. Problem is, I threw it away before I moved to Florida. Oops. 
Now I could get another one. I suppose if I dig around our labs I could find an old one. But ewww, I mean, please, it has nothing to do with money. But AA batteries? Cassette Tapes? Major ugh, right?
So then I start thinking. I have all these digital devices laying around. One of them should be able to do this! So I could get an iTrip...definite possibility. I started wondering if there was an audio only record mode on my digital cam.
Then, duh, my cell phone (Nokia 3650...not bad for being so old!) has about 9 megs of free space (hehe it has 13 now). It has a tape recorder program and a speakerphone with a condenser mic. Perfect, right! The only glitch was that the recording software is artificially limited to a 1 minute clip. Fortunately, I found software for $13 that will fill the ram card. And with the low-res files, which I think are already better than a cassette recorder, my phone can now hold well over two hours of audio.
Gets better yet.
On the Thinkpad from work I used to sync this to (via IR), I had to use special Nokia software to translate the files (.AMR) to something I could use in Windows. Now I can transfer them easily with Bluetooth, with a couple of button clicks on my phone. And Quicktime opens them right up without any software. Better yet, SoundStudio imports them using quicktime, and can easily apply a compressor and noise reduction.
So, wham, bam, my sessions are going into noise reduced AAC's and into iTunes!
I haven't paid for the audio recording software yet, because it's still on trial, and I want to make sure it works for me. But I'm so happy! It's funny, I've never bought shareware before I got my iBook. Now I've bought iRecordMusic, SideTrack and now this will probably be my third.
Anyway, another person mentioned in another thread about one of the Moto phones how it takes 15 minutes to download an MP3 file to his phone. I was surprised, so I tried it with my phone, and I was getting about 5 kb/s, and it looked like it would take about 15 minutes, just like he said. The thing that surprised me, is that sending a file from the phone to the computer is astonishingly faster...when I sent the audio file over, I was getting 25 kb/s.... Anyone know if that's a fundamental aspect of bluetooth? I didn't think the transfer speeds were asynchronous.
Question number two, just for curiousity....has anyone out there actually ever bought software for their cell phone? I feel like I'm friggin' Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. The stuff doesn't really even come with a manual most of the time.... Or any other source of documentation. I got a pretty cool messenging client, AgileMessenger, which is like an Adium of the cell phone world, but I never used it, so I finally just deleted it. But I never got it to connect to MSN, and I could never figure out why. But I just wondered, since Mac people are relatively non-averse to buying software, whether anyone else had bought cellphone software.
Now I could get another one. I suppose if I dig around our labs I could find an old one. But ewww, I mean, please, it has nothing to do with money. But AA batteries? Cassette Tapes? Major ugh, right?
So then I start thinking. I have all these digital devices laying around. One of them should be able to do this! So I could get an iTrip...definite possibility. I started wondering if there was an audio only record mode on my digital cam.
Then, duh, my cell phone (Nokia 3650...not bad for being so old!) has about 9 megs of free space (hehe it has 13 now). It has a tape recorder program and a speakerphone with a condenser mic. Perfect, right! The only glitch was that the recording software is artificially limited to a 1 minute clip.
Fortunately, I found software for $13 that will fill the ram card. And with the low-res files, which I think are already better than a cassette recorder, my phone can now hold well over two hours of audio.Gets better yet.
On the Thinkpad from work I used to sync this to (via IR), I had to use special Nokia software to translate the files (.AMR) to something I could use in Windows. Now I can transfer them easily with Bluetooth, with a couple of button clicks on my phone. And Quicktime opens them right up without any software. Better yet, SoundStudio imports them using quicktime, and can easily apply a compressor and noise reduction.
So, wham, bam, my sessions are going into noise reduced AAC's and into iTunes!
I haven't paid for the audio recording software yet, because it's still on trial, and I want to make sure it works for me. But I'm so happy! It's funny, I've never bought shareware before I got my iBook. Now I've bought iRecordMusic, SideTrack and now this will probably be my third.
Anyway, another person mentioned in another thread about one of the Moto phones how it takes 15 minutes to download an MP3 file to his phone. I was surprised, so I tried it with my phone, and I was getting about 5 kb/s, and it looked like it would take about 15 minutes, just like he said. The thing that surprised me, is that sending a file from the phone to the computer is astonishingly faster...when I sent the audio file over, I was getting 25 kb/s.... Anyone know if that's a fundamental aspect of bluetooth? I didn't think the transfer speeds were asynchronous.
Question number two, just for curiousity....has anyone out there actually ever bought software for their cell phone?
I feel like I'm friggin' Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. The stuff doesn't really even come with a manual most of the time.... Or any other source of documentation. I got a pretty cool messenging client, AgileMessenger, which is like an Adium of the cell phone world, but I never used it, so I finally just deleted it. But I never got it to connect to MSN, and I could never figure out why. But I just wondered, since Mac people are relatively non-averse to buying software, whether anyone else had bought cellphone software.
