Hello all - this is my first post and I am not a technically minded person so please bear with me! I recently purchased a used iRiver H120 and immediately replaced the battery (an operation which went smoothly, thank goodness) and installed Rockbox.
I want to use the H120 to record bird calls so was imagining that I could simply use my old camcorder directional rifle mic (a very cheap one) which I have used relatively successfully with a Sony MD recorder. However the mic does not do as well in the iRiver - I think I need something with a higher gain/more sensitivity to quieter sounds, as the results I got were very quiet. Pushing up the gain to max on Rockbox gives very hissy results.
I am a total novice at microphones but through reading it seems I need either a better mic with higher gain or a pre-amp setup.
The trouble with the pre-amp idea is that I cannot find a reasonably cheap one which runs off batteries, and also using one will start to make the setup a bit cumbersome for field recording.
So can anyone recommend a decent mic (directional)?
Or can anyone tell me the technical specs I need to be looking for when I am considering a mic?
And finally a silly technical question: is the battery in a powered mic used for pre-amping the signal, or for something else?? (You can see I don't know much, can't you?). If so, do I just need to buy a mic which takes a lot of batteries???
Thanks for your patience!
Sean