Up until now I've been using my trusty Sony ICD-B600. It's a digital recorder, but has no way to offload the recordings. So my process for analysis of a night recording is as follows:
1) Plug in a pair of headphones and listen to the entire recording
2) Clip out parts that are of interest
3) Record the clips via Line In to my computer into Audacity.
4) Listen again to the clip to see if it's something worthwhile.
5) If so, export to MP3 and upload to the blog.
The Sony is not very good at playback - even with the volume turned up all the way and wearing a set of "cans" I have to be in a quiet room to really hear faint noises. At work, with many co-workers around me, this can prove difficult.
A year ago for Christmas I got a Sansa e280 mp3 player so I could have something to listen to whilst I work out. A week ago I replaced the "operating system" of the device with an open-source software package called Rockbox. After going through it's features I had an epiphany: the mp3 player had recording capability, and also had some things I was desperately needing.
A friend on Facebook suggested a while ago that I should go digital completely, and have the computer look for anomalies in the recording. Most of the things that occur barely register a spike, so I would be problematic to write software that wouldn't miss important things - nay, I'll still have to listen to the recording and let my ears pick up the telltale whisper or voice. But going digital does have some added benefits.
For one, Rockbox has some excellent settings for the recorder, mainly the ability to turn up the gain for the mike. This would allow me to record very faint sounds in the house, and allow me to pick up things like the whisper a lot better.
Secondly, the device is also a USB hard drive, so the recordings can be copied off of it to my desktop's hard drive. From there I can load the entire recording into Audacity, amp the volume, and listen with as much gain as I need. Tre chic!
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