Settings to record voice to MP3 with iRiver H1xx

[Muse]

I want to record my instructor's comments in my yoga class (got her permission). She moves around the room at times and faces in all kinds of directions. I want to make acceptable recordings where it's not hard to understand what she's saying. The classes are an hour long.

What kind of settings and equipment should I use? My experiments yesterday seem to indicate that the internal microphone makes better recordings than the supplied external microphone, at least in my experiments using the iRiver firmware. I made one recording using the Rockbox firmware using the internal microphone, and using Voice AGC On, mono, but wasn't impressed. I'd hoped that the levels would remain fairly constant as I walked further away from the microphone but found this was not the case at all.

So far, I've used 128 kb and 44.1 Khz (both iRiver and Rockbox firmware), highest recording level (20) using iRiver firmware. Is 22 Khz quite sufficient for this, or should I stick with 44.1? Also, is 128 kb the best idea? A one hour recording at the settings I've experimented with would turn out around 60 MB.

Should I invest in a microphone and if so, can I get suggestions? Thanks for any help with this.

[Davide-NYC]

For this type of thing I would use Internal-Mic --> Mp3/160kbps/44.1kHz/Mono
AGC safety and set the gain as high as you are comfortable with.
I'd give a medium clap once or twice to check for clipping.

(I'm presuming that nothing is louder than a moderate clap in your yoga class. The loudest thing in my yoga class is the jump forward or maybe the closing chant. You should be fine.)

To stabilize levels you can try to compress the audio after it's recorded in an audio program like audacity.

[Muse]

For this type of thing I would use Internal-Mic --> Mp3/160kbps/44.1kHz/Mono
AGC safety and set the gain as high as you are comfortable with.
I'd give a medium clap once or twice to check for clipping.

(I'm presuming that nothing is louder than a moderate clap in your yoga class. The loudest thing in my yoga class is the jump forward or maybe the closing chant. You should be fine.)

To stabilize levels you can try to compress the audio after it's recorded in an audio program like audacity.

Thanks. My experiments are yielding pretty satisfactory results using the Internal mic, whether using iRiver or Rockbox firmware. There shouldn't be anything very loud. The thing that worries me a bit is something I have no control over, which is the fact that the instructor always turns on some ambient music of some sort around 5 minutes into the session. However, I always position myself close to her and will come in even earlier tomorrow to make sure my mat is at center/front. I'll leave my H140 on a handkerchief beside my mat by a foot or so.

In my experiments I did use Audacity and used Amplify against obviously low level portions of the recording. However, they were around 2-2.5 minutes long, and it will be a lot harder to do this with an hour recording. Someone at Anandtech forums recommended a freebie called levelator, and I'm going to download and experiment with it. Some people have told me I should record in WAV and do my file manipulations on that and finally compress, to any of several compression formats, not necessarily MP3. However, I don't have any experience making WAV recordings, and don't know what settings to use, assuming that specific settings are necessary when making WAV recordings.