Recommendations for handheld audio recorder

I am using FCE 3 for "event" videography (i.e. weddings, student concerts, graduations, etc.), and I am considering using one of the following external sound recorders:
Zoom H4
Edirol R-09HR
Sony Portable 24 bit
I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with any of the devices listed above. I've read the reviews on Amazon, CNET, etc, and they all seem similarly reviewed. The only remark I noted was that the Zoom H 4 does NOT sinc with the audio from the captured video because it apparently plays back at a slightly different speed. (The reviewer on Amazon stated that the company acknowledges this phenomenon.)
Any suggestions, recommendations, feedback is appreciated.
Thanks,
Gary

I recently bought an Olympus WS110 digital voice recorder and of course tested it immediately.
To my horror I discovered that it drifted out of sync by over a second during a 7 minute test!
Luckily the drift was constant and not fluctuating so all I had to do was alter the speed to 100.28% and it was spot on at every point during the whole 7 minutes.
Regarding the quality of the audio ....... when played back through its internal speaker I have never heard anything so bad! Extremely low, squawky volume with appalling background hiss and shush!
Fortunately, when played back on the computer it was "good" quality ....... similar to a decent built in camcorder mike.
When tested with a cheap tieclip microphone plugged in, the quality was very good.
As with all mike's it needs to be within a foot of the person's mouth to achieve high quality.
PS. The test picture! This shows the audio from the camera on tracks 1 and 2 with the mono audio of the Olympus on track 3 towards the end of the test.
The audio spikes were caused by me clapping at intervals throughout the test - an excellent way of achieving sync!
Message was edited by: Ian R. Brown

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While firewire is stil the standard for realtime full duplex multichannel audiorecording (see also current interfaces at Steinberg, Focusrite etc) it seems impossible to buy anything portable besides an Apple laptop. Not because firewire is not available (although less and less!), but mainly because the only thrustworthy firewire-cards seems to have Texas Instruments chipsets. So we search for specs of chipsets on the firewirecard, buy that card to be sure that we will not have crackles, hickups and other distortions during recordingsessions. In fact we are not certain, until we tried the configuration. Because we don't know what to look for. In PC-world, nothing seems to be sure.
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While the world is getting used to portable computers more and more, every day more (young) musicians are able to buy decent microphones and preamps, step by step building up there own homestudio. And while there are people recording with tablets already (although very limited), the laptopsellers seem not to have any clou that there is a need for something portable that can record with these firewire audiointerfaces.
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Firewire is still the standard in audiorecording. Check for example the interfaces on:
http://www.steinberg.net/
http://global.focusrite.com/

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Hi, hope everyone is doing well today. I'm new to this forum but I have been occasionally browsing it from time to time and find it very useful. So I figured I would post a couple questions that I have.
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1. If someone could recomend me an external hard drive that is abosolutly amazing for audio recording and such around $150. I would ONLY be using the drive to save my audio files. Definitaly needs to be firewire also.
2. Next question is. I've heard of people booting from their external hard drives which has nothing but there OS and there audio recording application. That way when they boot it up they don't have processes running "Behind the scenes" and taking up some processor power. Is this true? If so, how would you going about doing this and what would I need?
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iMac G5 w/o iSight Mac OS X (10.4.4) 20" screen 2.0 Ghz, 1.5 RAM, 250GB Hard Drive

1. If someone could recomend me an external hard
drive that is abosolutly amazing for audio recording
and such around $150. I would ONLY be using the
drive to save my audio files. Definitaly needs to be
firewire also.
Hard drives are pretty much the same. 7200 rpm are obviously a bit faster than 5400rpm. Why Firewire? USB 2 is about the same speed as standard Firewire 400, but the drives are cheaper.
2. Next question is. I've heard of people booting
from their external hard drives which has nothing but
there OS and there audio recording application. That
way when they boot it up they don't have processes
running "Behind the scenes" and taking up some
processor power. Is this true? If so, how would you
going about doing this and what would I need?
OS processes are going to be running in the background regardless of which disk the OS is on, that's what an OS does! If you don't want more processes simply make sure you don't have any other apps open. I don't know Cubase, but a G5 will handle video editing along with background tasks no problem, and video editing generally involves far more data manipulation than just sound, even if you're doing multiple tracks.
You can easily install the OS on an external hard drive using your original system install disk. Simply connect the drive and choose that as the destination in the installer. To boot from that you would choose it in System preferences/Startup Disk. You could minimise that system by deleting other applications from that drive's Applications folder, turning off internet connections, disabling all widgets etc, but as long as you only have Cubase open it shouldn't make too much difference.
3. If anybody else that is reading this is like me
and does alot of audio editing on their iMac G5
computer if you could give me some tips in optimizing
the performance of the computer in order to get the
most out of it.
There's not really much else to optimise. Modern Macs are not like computers of old, and OS X is a very modern system, not requiring the type of disk optimisation etc that there used to be.
See: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

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Audio recording: MacBook VS MacBook Pro

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I need an app that allows - top notch Powerpoint accessibility. Notetaking and audio recording. AND a possible translator. Is there any appl or two that are recommended for a busy traveling executive?

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Japanese Translator.
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dmkimball wrote:
Japanese Translator.
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Thanks

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App for making And splitting audio recording (iphone 4)

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I just want an app that I can use at work to record meetings and interviews.
And when I am done listening to half of a track, I want to be able to split it and delete the first half.
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Greetings, folks. I'm a recent convert to Macs and to Logic Express, having futzed around with various flavors of Sonar and wanting to take advantage of the many nice features of my Macbook. I've been working through the Logic Pro and Express training manual and I think I'm coming up to speed on using LE OK. My main use for LE, though, is going to be audio recording small acoustic ensembles (and mainly acoustic guitar and vocals), and I could really use a fuller discussion of LE's audio recording and editing features than is found in the training manual. What I'm really looking for, I suppose, are task-oriented explanations of how to do things such as comping tracks, rather than the system-oriented descriptions of what you find in the various LE windows. Any recommendations?
Thanks,
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