Project Studios and Home Recording

[Violine]

Originally posted by wst3
Actually, my point exactly... the preamps in the portable minidisk and DAT recorders are notoriously bad, mostly due to insufficient headroom. Almost anything is an improvement<G>! Since you work on location, and the rest of your rig does not need AC power, I would suggest the Midiman AudioBuddy. It can be modified to operate off batteries, and the performance in that mode is actually remarkably good. (Caveat - I do some design work for MIDIMan)

Gotcha. Now I understand. Core Sound offers a special cable that kind of does the same thing (I think).

Oh, and btw, I usually do operate off AC power when recording. I just don't trust batteries in the middle of a 2 hour concert - no matter how fresh. I know, the mini disc won't start slowing down like the old cassette recorders used to do, but... I make sure I have a freshly charged rechargeable battery in the machine, and I still plug it in. Then if the thing gets unplugged (which has happened), the recording won't get interrupted.

Call me paranoid, but I also change the mic battery at intermission if I can.

I've played around with the stealth microphones, not Core Sound's to the best of my knowledge but others, and I was prepared to be really impressed... but I wasn't!

Two alternatives you might consider are the Oktava and Marshall lines. Both have small diaphram condensor microphones that sound pretty good, and a pair of either will cost you less than $300.

I'll look into them. I'm not quite ready to buy yet anyway.

Others to check out include Wavelab from Steinberg, Samplewrench from dissidents, and CoolEdit Pro from Syntrillium.

[stuff deleted]

.... non-destructive editors, like Samplitude and SAW...
Wavelab V3 has a non-destructive mode, but I haven't tried it yet.

I don't know if I have the time, energy or need to use all the features these programs have. I really don't want to ALTER performance. For archival and study/learning, I want to be able to hear exactly what happened. And as for submitting competition or festival applications, well, doctoring is ILLEGAL (I'm sure it's done, but since live performance is my end product, I want my applications to demonstrate my ability to do just that).

And also since all this is VERY new to me, I still haven't even figured out how to convert this nice extracted WAV file to MP3...