Iriver IFP 895 Recording/ Lapel Mic

[gplefka]

I just purchased the Griffin Stereo Lapelmic and hooked it to my laptop. I soon discovered that my comp did not record the stereo feed. Do I need to purchase a stereo USB adapter to record in stereo? If so which is the best/most economical?

Also, I want to do mobile podcasts which apparently requires an Iriver. Does this device record in stereo with good quality?


http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoundOff

[ferg]

Whether or not you need a USB stereo interface, depends on your soundcard. If your line in is not stereo, then you would need an alternate method.

As for the iRiver, it records in some proprietary format similar to mp3 (will convert to mp3 for you when you dump the files off of it) up to 320kbps stereo. I feel that the sound quality is excellent for a small unit the price of the iRiver.

We've been recording all of our podcasts on the iRiver, however, I feel as though the multiple conversion process results in certain artifacts that are undesirable. I end up encoding the final mix at 64 kbps, 44 khz, because that's the minimum that sounds *good* doing joint stereo makes a lot of it sound "computerized", etc.

Now, I'm not sure if that's a symptom of the software or the iRiver, which is why I'm going to record the next podcast in straight .wav using an m-audio transit, which is a stereo usb a/d converter that does 24 bit 96 khz. We'll see how it goes, I guess.

[gplefka]

Thanks

[audiocollective]

The iRiver will do really well but the Griffin mic. sucks... sorry you had to here that now but it wont give you top quality sound. As far as the computer questing, most computers record in stereo and it is most likely the software you are using to record that is telling it to only record mono.

[shepdave]

I record my shows into an iRiver iFP 790. I am still experimenting, but I try to record at a fairly high bitrate. Then after I import them to my iBook, I save them as WAV files for me to edit and process, so I don't get loss every time I save. Once I'm all done prettying it up, I do a final save as an mp3 before uploading.

I have been encoding the final product at a much too high bitrate, but I'm going to do the next one at 44.1 kHz sampling and 64 kbs bitrate.

I like the iRiver very much, but I was never impressed with the sound of that Griffin stereo lapel mic when Adam Curry recorded with it on the DSC.

Dave