Blop, blop, pschit, plouf!
Jan. 24th, 2005 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI spent a sunny Sunday walking around Hakodate recording sound with a couple of students. They had a video camera and were mostly videoing me. I had my little Fuji F601 digicam and was recording the buzz of generators in the market, the bubble of crab tanks, the rattle of toy trains at Hakodate station, the ghostly swoosh of cars passing on the elevated highway, the spongey slop of water at the docks.
The sound on my students' video camera was 44.1kHz stereo, whereas the sound on my little Fuji is 8-bit mono. So a rather absurd situation unfolded; the students documented, in gorgeous hi-fi, me recording sounds in crappy lo-fi. My recordings will be full of wind noise and scuzzy digital artifacts, theirs will be as beautiful and nuanced as these two fabulous recordings on Arte Radio, which you absolutely must listen to right away:
1. Geyser ("Blop, blop, pschit, plouf" -- the sound of a geyser in Iceland).
2. Appels de Tanger (a city, Tangier, Morocco, in full cry).
Hopefully I'll soon be making recordings as lovely and faithful as these. I've just ordered a new camera, a Sony Cybershot M1. It'll be delivered from Tokyo in a couple of days.
The Cybershot M1 is a very new camera, just released last month. It's a hybrid of a video camera and a still camera. There are stereo microphones and, thanks to MPEG4 compression and Sony's Pro Duo memory card, you can store almost an hour's worth of 30 fps video with stereo sound. I'm hoping the sound is in 44.1kHz format -- digicam makers never, ever seem to tell you their cameras' sound sampling rates, even in the technical small print. The lens is a bit slow, but the camera is sure to be an improvement on my ailing Fuji, which currently only takes photos if I give it a good slap. Don't tell me I've made the wrong choice please; I've already paid $564.44 of my Future University lecture fees towards the gadget. (That's considerably cheaper than the US price, and word is that the camera won't be released in Europe at all.)
The sound on my students' video camera was 44.1kHz stereo, whereas the sound on my little Fuji is 8-bit mono. So a rather absurd situation unfolded; the students documented, in gorgeous hi-fi, me recording sounds in crappy lo-fi. My recordings will be full of wind noise and scuzzy digital artifacts, theirs will be as beautiful and nuanced as these two fabulous recordings on Arte Radio, which you absolutely must listen to right away:
1. Geyser ("Blop, blop, pschit, plouf" -- the sound of a geyser in Iceland).
2. Appels de Tanger (a city, Tangier, Morocco, in full cry).
Hopefully I'll soon be making recordings as lovely and faithful as these. I've just ordered a new camera, a Sony Cybershot M1. It'll be delivered from Tokyo in a couple of days.
The Cybershot M1 is a very new camera, just released last month. It's a hybrid of a video camera and a still camera. There are stereo microphones and, thanks to MPEG4 compression and Sony's Pro Duo memory card, you can store almost an hour's worth of 30 fps video with stereo sound. I'm hoping the sound is in 44.1kHz format -- digicam makers never, ever seem to tell you their cameras' sound sampling rates, even in the technical small print. The lens is a bit slow, but the camera is sure to be an improvement on my ailing Fuji, which currently only takes photos if I give it a good slap. Don't tell me I've made the wrong choice please; I've already paid $564.44 of my Future University lecture fees towards the gadget. (That's considerably cheaper than the US price, and word is that the camera won't be released in Europe at all.)
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Re: Record through your iPod
Date: 2005-01-24 04:33 pm (UTC)> information seems highly uncertain.
I seem to be an early adopter on this one, noone else online seems to have taken it beyond proof of concept stage... mind you all I've done so far is taken the dock connector off a cheapo 3rd party ipod charger and soldered 2 phono sockets on according to schematics found on the Podzilla site.
Even when I do get round to making a preamp tho, it'll still not be ideal, as the software has (as yet) no way to monitor the audio, no levels/peak indicator, no volume control. And I'm no programmer so can't do anything about this myself. My plan is to build the preamp and basically 'tune' it to a suitably max recording level by recording tests louder and louder, then check the wavs + see what's the highest it can get without clipping, hardwire it to that volume and hope for the best.
You can record mono without any modification though, through the headphone jack... but it sounds pretty much awful, the ipod's built in preamping is really quiet + hissy. Kind of fun though, and in an Agent Cooper type emergency I could use the headphones as a super-lo-fi dictaphone mic! :)
I definitely think the Jukebox 3 would be a much better option for serious use, the ipod thing I'm only pursuing because I have one already, and like my noise electronics DIY! :)
I'll probably write a how-to myself on my site if/when I complete the project.
Re: Record through your iPod
Date: 2005-01-24 07:59 pm (UTC)I assume using the dock input bypasses the preamp? How is the sound quality of the ADC? Can you share a sound sample?
Re: Record through your iPod
Date: 2005-01-24 08:52 pm (UTC)The ADC is probably not amazing, but sounds passable for my purposes anyway. ... I haven't done any properly scientific tests yet, and haven't saved any of the sounds I recorded, but will do some time.
here's my thread about this on the ipodlinux forums... I'll post further results there at some point in the futures... there's some discussion of the Nomad etc too... http://www.ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=880