10-RES-Recording with a digital recorder

On this worksheet you find the general process.
MP3 players with recording function do not necessarily record to MP3 files, in fact not many do. The ZOOM H2 (used for this example) costs about £150.

Step 1: Plug in the ZOOM H2 and switch it on.

Step 2: Record. Ideally you speak into the microphone at a distance of about 20 cm. For a complete recording cycle you have to press the red recording button three times.
1. time: a red light flashes and when you speak you can see the input level of your voice. It should be between a half and a third of the bar.
2. time: the red light is stable, the device is recording.
3. time: this stops the recording. Your recording takes a few seconds to be processed. Now it is saved and available as an MP3 file.

Step 3: Listen to the audio file. You’ll have to change the setting on your device.

Step 4: Transfer the audio file(s) to the computer (Windows XP and VISTA and Mac OS X systems*). This is usually straightforward if you plug the device into your computer with the USB cable.

Comments:
- How do you recognise an audio file? A file type or file format can be recognised by its extension, which are the letters after the dot in a file name. A filename.doc is a MS Word document, a filename.jpg is a picture file and filename.mp3 or filename.wav are audio files. These are just a few examples. There are many file extenstions and many audio file extensions.
- What are common audio formats? *.mp3, *.wav, *.wma, *.cda, *.mid, *.aiff, *.acc, *.ra …
- Why are MP3 files so popular? They compress audio data into much smaller files without losing much quality.
- You may want to create clips from your newly created audio recordings or cut out rustling at the beginning and end of the recording. This can be done in Audacity. Find instructions on how to us it on the work sheet ‘Edit with Audacity’

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