Digital Voice Recorder vs Tape Recorder - for recording practices

I use a Memorex IC Recorder. It was probably around $30 and sounds at least as good as my old dictation recorder. Both are terrible sounding, just barely good enough to get an idea down. I run a line out of the headphone jack to my mixer and then sound card.

"Do you have any samples of music that you recorded with your Memorex IC? I am curious about how well it captures different frequencies."

If you have to ask, then these little dictation recorders probably aren't for you as the quality is unimaginably bad. All I use them for is to get a small hint of an idea down with, like maybe early in the morning if I wake up from a dream with a song in it and I want to put it down quick before I forget it or something. I use them to leave myself voice messages more than anything though.

It just dawned on me that maybe you're used to those dictation recorders with full size cassette tapes in them. Those will sound considerably better than my digital unit which sounds more like those very tiny tape recorders that use micro-cassette 1/16" tape. Anyhow here's what it sounds like, and I was probably half asleep when I did this, just jotting down a mental note. All I did to it in my wave editor was to raise the volume.

http://billseper.com/junk/dictation_sample1.mp3

Here's the same file with a low-end boost and some noise reduction.

http://billseper.com/junk/dictation_sample2.mp3

Actually, I think yours sounds considerably better than mine. But, mine's a few years old now and a cheap one at that. Those that you're looking at might sound much better across the board considering how much cheap memory is available now. I couldn't care less how they sound. I just want to be able to make out the notes.

How do you figure that tapes are less expensive than digital? I have a feeling that if you compared the cost (and inflexibility, and speedy degradation) of analog cassette tape with that of digital audio, you might be in for a surprise. For example, at tape.com, they sell a 100 pack of 62-minute cassette tapes for $30. Not too bad. They sell a 100 pack of 80-minute CDs for $17.50. That would seem to make digital less expensive, at least with respect to removable media.

I haven't figured out the math myself, but according to Cakewalk, uncompressed, stereo, CD-quality audio at 16-bit/44.1 KHz requires 10.3 MB/minute. Mono requires 5.2 MB/minute. Let's be conservative and assume that you are recording in stereo.

A 500 GB Western Digital hard drive costs $125 at Newegg.com right now. Because hard drive manufacturers use a different measure of gigabytes than the rest of the computing world, this comes out to more like 465.6 GB. So, let's break this down on a per minute basis.

Cassette tape = 206.6 minutes per dollar (with 62-minute tape)
Cassette tape = 264.7 minutes per dollar (with 90-minute tape, 100-pack at $34)
Hard Disk = 370.3 minutes per dollar
CD = 457.1 minutes per dollar

So, CDs win the minutes per dollar award. Cassette tapes, at 90 minutes a piece, cost about 40% more per minute than hard disk, if I've done my math correctly. What's more, 100 cassette tapes take up a lot of space and audibly break down in just a few years. 100 CDs take up less space and have a better archival life, but are still less than convenient. A 500 GB hard disk isn't much bigger than two slices of bread. It supports random access to all of the files on the disk and can be searched by freely available utilities. Note, if you compress your audio with an MP3 encoder, the digital media become even cheaper, by 4 to 8 times. I also did not account for a 4-track, in which case your 90-minute tape becomes a 45-minute tape.

100 tapes (at 90 minutes) can hold 9,000 minutes of music.
100 CDs can hold 8,000 minutes of music
1 hard drive (at 500 GB) can hold 46,289 minutes of music.

I'm afraid that the economic argument does not hold up here, neither does one based on archival life, ease of access, or ease of storage. If you are already setting up a four track and mics, you could do things with your computer almost as easily, provided the 1-minute boot time would not get in the way.

Just some food for thought.

There are real benefits to having a dedicated device, such as a tape machine, where you can just hit record and go for it. My price calculations also don't account for the hundreds of extra dollars you need in order to have a computer to which the hard disk is attached. I also did not include a facility, such as another hard disk, to back up all that data you are creating. However, cassette tapes are kind of a dead end. They've always sounded badly and they are not very convenient or long-lived. There isn't a really good, cheap, and easy answer to the problem. My preference would be to record on the computer as much as possible, but all methods have their pluses and minuses.

Hey Travis, I meant to mention this little mp3 recorder made by Iriver.

http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/iriver-t30-wma-ogg-mp3-player-with-voice-recording-and-linein/

Somebody in a video forum tipped me off to it about a year ago. I've never seen one in use but it looks interesting for field recording.

You might try asking around in the Mystic River Forums.