Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Thanks to a couple of my Christmas presents, I, the person who edited video in college with a china pencil and a razor blade, am now entering the digital age.

The Gryphon got me a Sony voice recorder with 64 MB of flash memory that can record up to 32 hours of sound. I'm using it right now, walking our dog, Una, while I dictate this entry.

It took a little bit of getting used to at first, but there are definite advantages. For one, it's a lot smaller and easier to handle than my old mini cassette recorder. So it's easier to balance it, a plastic bag and a leash, for example, or to pocket it when I'm not using it.

Another advantage is that, because the sound is digital, you can upload it onto the computer and use the Digital Voice Editor software that comes with it to save files to your desktop and to navigate through them while transcribing them.

Now there are a lot more functions it performs, which I haven't experimented with yet, such as the ability to edit audio, and it's possible to create digital files and then move them to different folders inside the voice recorder itself. That could be useful if you were traveling and recording multiple entries, for example. I might consider doing that when I'm on vacation, rather than just counting on my memory.

It has a pretty wide-ranging capacity. It can record for a long time in a stretch without having to, for example, slip over a tape. This could be good for interviews, which will free me from the need to keep checking on the status of the tape.

The only drawback has been that it's not exactly self-explanatory. The manual is essentially a one-sheet page that isn't set up in a particularly user friendly manner. I have yet to sit down with it and figure out the higher level functions, although I do well with the basics I need on a daily basis.

Another problem only presents itself during the winter. The buttons are small and close together, and it's hard to manipulate them with gloves on. This means that every time I want to do something other than press "record", which sits separately than the rest, I have to remove my gloves.

My second foray into digital sound was brought about courtesy of the Apple iPod Nano my Dad gave me for Christmas. This is the next generation iPod, and it's a little whisper of a thing, about the length of a credit card but only 2/3 of its width and about the thickness of three credit cards stacked on top of each other.

Therefore, it's highly portable, as I've discovered. My favorite pair of everyday pants, a caramel colored pair of cargo pants, has a side perfect that works perfectly. In fact, the Nano absolutely swims in it. I'd have room for the voice recorder, as well, if I wanted.

In contrast to the Sony voice recorder, the iPod is fairly easy to use, although there are some peculiarities I'm still learning, such as navigation through the menus.

To use the iPod, it's recommended that you download iTunes for free. It took me almost no time to figure out how to upload songs, which was pretty self-explanatory. As soon as you pop a CD in, it asks if you want to add it to your library. If you say no, you can drag individual tracks into the music list of your choice.

Now, as soon as you install iTunes, it also asks you if you want it to go through your hard drive to find songs to include in the music library. I'd recommend against this, unless you know that all the songs on your hard drive are ones you're interested in including. In my case, it found all the CDs I'd put there, including albums slated for Wild Violet review, and added all of them. After they were added, I had to go through all these tracks to determine which ones I really wanted in the library, and only a fraction made the cut.

Once I got through all that, I bought my first song on iTunes. When I say bought, I really mean acquired, since it was their freebie of the week. Since then, I've been adding music from my existing CD library. I never realized how much David Bowie I actually have until I started adding them. It took me forever just to get through the B's.

I'm discovering some functions now, like the playback functions. Because as I've found, sometimes when you're, say, walking the dog and you have it set on random, it might bring up a song that's not great to walk to, such as an eight-minute piano concerto. You can set up playlists or have it just say songs from a particular genre, artist or album. Or you can set up specific playlists to suit different moods or occasions.

So far, I've used up about a quarter of my memory and I'm up to the D's in my CD library, so I might end up eventually being a little choosier about which songs to include on my list of iPod songs. Since that's a separate list from the full music library, I could always add and subtract different songs periodically.

I'm having fun playing with my iPod, so much so that The Gryphon is considering getting his own. He's a commuter, traveling back to forth about an hour and a half each way. So I'm sure he'd get lots of use out of an iPod.

As far as drawbacks, the only one that really jumps to mind is the fact that the ear buds that come with the iPod aren't great. They're hard to position properly in the ear, and if you touch them once you can't get them back into position. So I spent about $12 and bought a better pair that fits over your earlobe to keep them in place.

My dad had given me some expensive looking noise reduction headphones that are good enough quality, I'd imagine, to use at a radio station. They'll be good for at home use, I'm sure.

The sound levels can be a little touchy, and the instructions are pretty slim. I suppose they expect you to access the online help guide, but when I'm faced with that as an option, I usually just try to figure it out myself. I don't know why, but I prefer my instructions in black and white on paper. Funny, when you consider how much of my writing and editing is online.

I'm having fun in these new experiments with sound, having finally entered the 21st century.

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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