Is the supplied external mic of the H1xx better than the internal?

[Muse]

Ho much did you have to set your gain to?

I don't believe I set the gain for the Radio Shack external microphone at all in Rockbox. The levels looked very good except when the battery button wasn't installed, in which case they looked very low. Not knowing how to fix that I didn't adjust anything. With the button battery installed the response bars swept left to right nearly all the way. Of course, this was when I had the unit close to me and 1/2 an arm's length. Actual usage for my application this week will be much different. The recorder will be minimally 10 feet from the speaker and sometimes as much as 30 feet or more in a large room whose walls are covered with mirrors on 3 sides and glass on the other. As well, the orientation of the speaker will ignore the position of the recorder/microphone (she'll be speaking in all different directions).

Edit: Using Rockbox, under Recording Settings there is an item, Automatic Gain Control and there are several options in there. Since I'm recording voice, I figured that the option of choice is probably "Voice (fast)". Would this be correct?

Edit2: Petur, I can't find where I can set the gain.

[petur]

Experiment, experiment experiment. And please read the fine manual...

Gain is right below the volume, very hard to miss :p

[Muse]

Experiment, experiment experiment. And please read the fine manual...

Gain is right below the volume, very hard to miss :p

Sorry I haven't gone to the manual yet on that, mea culpa. I did more experimenting yesterday and some very strange things seemed to be happening. The gain seemed to increase by itself as I tried to tweak the levels. All while I was holding it in my hand, pressing nothing. Maybe it's self regulating? Dunno. Then I found where the control was and tweaked. Well, I was only using the supplied ext mic. The gain doesn't seem to apply to the internal mic, which still gives me incredibly better results than the external mic. I have to wonder if I'm not doing something wrong. I'm bringing the Radio Shack mic back to the store today, anyway. I figure that it depending on a tiny battery and having no way to ascertain the state of charge of that battery other than maybe removing it and testing its voltage is just a show stopper. I haven't conducted any experiments with it in the last couple of days, but I'm going to be in the vicinity of the RS store today, so back it goes.

That Church_Audio guy on ebay has an external mic that's an inch long, $19 shipped, and I'm thinking of getting that. Will see. The other stuff seems to be for different kinds of purposes, principally stereo and with amplification. Anyway, I'm still not on taperssection yet, AFAIK. Haven't gotten any emails from them.

Thanks for the help.

[petur]

I did more experimenting yesterday and some very strange things seemed to be happening. The gain seemed to increase by itself as I tried to tweak the levels. All while I was holding it in my hand, pressing nothing. Maybe it's self regulating?

DUH!

Look up two posts, where you wrote yourself that you enabled Automatic Gain Control, what do you really think that function will do?

[Muse]

Please excuse me, I really am pretty stupid about a lot of things.

[Llorean]

Well, a suggestion to avoid responses like that would be to read the manual so that you're familiar with what settings do before you change them.

[Muse]

I made my first recording this morning in my yoga class. Based on recommendations (well, some of them) I chose to make the recording in WAV. I figure I can do experiments, adjust levels, and when I'm happy with how it sounds, rip it to MP3 using the LAME encoder or maybe rip to another format. Probably will make several compressed versions and compare. I'm told there's no necessity to have a 60 MB file for a one hour voice recording. Right now the WAV is probably around 5 times that size.

One thing I'm wondering about. In using WAV, encoding parameters were N/A, evidently. However, AGC was in effect and I used "Voice (fast)." Is that appropriate or should I have used "Safety (clip)" or some other?

[Febs]

One thing I'm wondering about. In using WAV, encoding parameters were N/A, evidently. However, AGC was in effect and I used "Voice (fast)." Is that appropriate or should I have used "Safety (clip)" or some other?

Have you read the description in the manual of what these settings do?

[petur]

One thing I'm wondering about. In using WAV, encoding parameters were N/A, evidently. However, AGC was in effect and I used "Voice (fast)." Is that appropriate or should I have used "Safety (clip)" or some other?

1) when saving as wav, there are no parameters to configure

2) AGC adapts the gain to the signal on the fly, the AGC mode sets the speed at which it responds to those changes (except AGC SAFETY which will only lower the gain, never increase)

It all depends on the environment in which you do the recording, so experiment a bit to find the settings that fits you most.

After recording, you can open your WAV file in audacity or another editor to normalize or even do dynamic compression...

[Muse]

One thing I'm wondering about. In using WAV, encoding parameters were N/A, evidently. However, AGC was in effect and I used "Voice (fast)." Is that appropriate or should I have used "Safety (clip)" or some other?

1) when saving as wav, there are no parameters to configure

2) AGC adapts the gain to the signal on the fly, the AGC mode sets the speed at which it responds to those changes (except AGC SAFETY which will only lower the gain, never increase)

It all depends on the environment in which you do the recording, so experiment a bit to find the settings that fits you most.

After recording, you can open your WAV file in audacity or another editor to normalize or even do dynamic compression...

The environment is not good. The room's walls are completely glass (mirrors on 3 sides). The result is poor acoustics, a considerable echo effect. I suppose there's nothing that can be done about that. In any case, the recording I made yesterday came out rather satisfactory.

I tried normalizing a test file (using Audacity 1.2.6) but the result wasn't good. I was introduced a couple of days ago to a great utility called The Levelator:

http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/

I heard that Audacity 1.3.5 beta includes leveling, but The Levelator seems to have done a very good job. You just drag and drop your WAV or AIFF file onto it and it processes it to more or less equalize the volume. It was designed for those voice files in which some speakers are not as loud as others. I really like the results it gave me. I took the resulting WAV output file and ripped it to MP3 using the LAME encoder and wound up with a 30 MB file for the 1:04 recording. It sounds very good and in fact is pretty equivalent to being in the room live, is my thinking. In fact it might be better. I think that maybe the instructor didn't turn up the background music as high as usual in deference to the fact that I was recording.