Topic: Recorder for taping college classroom lectures?

[petur]

- Variable playback rate/pitch control would be good as I'll be listening to lectures during commuting to/from work every day (~3 hours in all), and getting more listening crammed in would be an efficient way to use my time.

- Pre-record buffer would also be nice, but probably not essential.

Rockbox

[DSatz]

Maybe this is perfectly obvious, but make sure that you record stereo. If you're forced to record from a bad position in the room (too far from the person speaking), stereo recording and (just as important) stereo headphones for playback will let your ears/brain do the remarkable, seemingly impossible thing that ears and brains can do in filtering out undesirable sound sources and zeroing in on what you want to hear. That doesn't work nearly as well with mono recordings or with loudspeaker playback.

--best regards

[MikeMannZ]

buy the m10...you're over thinking this.... take it from someone who did.

Mike

[rastasean]

Lots of good advice here. What did the OP end up going with?

[tugs]

Lots of good advice here. What did the OP end up going with?

I probably wont be buying until July, at which point I think it's the m10 all the way. It seems to have gone up in price in the last 2 weeks though 

[rastasean]

Lots of good advice here. What did the OP end up going with?

I probably wont be buying until July, at which point I think it's the m10 all the way. It seems to have gone up in price in the last 2 weeks though 

What has gone up in price? the m10 will be the same at b&h until end of june.

[kfrinkle]

Being a professor myself, I have no problems with taping in the classroom.  In fact, there have been a couple of courses this last year where I actually recorded the lectures myself.

That being said, you paid for the course, it is part of your studying practice and should be able to do so regardless of copyright.  You are PAYING the copyright by paying tuition.

[earmonger]

If you really want stealth:

http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/dp4802.html

Just upload it to your laptop and do all your pitch/speed control there.

[neumannu47]

Believe it or not, the Sansa Fuze, an MP3 player, has an excellent built-in voice recorder function. Unfortunately, the Version 2 units (all you can get now) have a hardware design flaw that allows a very low level ticking to get into the audio. It records 24kHz 16bit mono wave files. The crappy little mic picks up amazing well. When I was in law school, I used a Marantz cassette with an external boundary mic, with the professors' permission. The intelligibility was excellent.

The reason I mention the Sansa Fuze is that there is a possibility that not all of the units have the ticking problem. Some users on another board have suggested that the Version 1 units don't have the problem. If you can find one without the ticking, it will cost you about $50. It is VERY small and unobtrusive. I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference in the recording quality between the Fuze and an M10.

If you have a portable MP3 player, check to see if it has a voice-record function on it. If it does, try it. You might be very surprised.