Blogging for Fun and Profit

Ok a sarcastic title for a different day. My recording of the Rockford Celtic festival went better than expected. my recording setup into a minidisc recorder worked fantastically! I am finishing up a few thigs on the podcast and will be posting it by midnight tonight. Technical info on how I recorded it is actually quite simple. I ripped a couple of microphones out of really old laptops, wired them up to a cord from a set of headphones and stuck the microphones into a pair of pen caps. These I stuck on safety pin clasps so I can pin them to my hat, shirt lapel whatever... this gives me a binaurial recording setup which always captures better stereo seperation than any stereo microphone made. Now the minidisc recorder only puts out 1.5 volts to power the mics, this is bad as most recording I am interested in is high volume and the microphones will distort... so I pump 9 volts into the microphones by building a battery box... a pair of 1uf caps keeps the 9 volts from feeding into the minidisc and a pair of 10K resistors reduces crosstalk between the left and right channels. coupled with the setting of my recording levels manually the recordings are great!

This should work with any recorder with mic level input, if you have a mp3 unit that records, you need to convert to line level first with a small amplifier/mixer. when I get my Archos Gmini 400 I'll come up with a solution then for the line level dilemma.

If you hate celtic folk and music I suggest skipping my podcast this month. otherwise i think you'll like it. I will be posting links to the artists webpages that you will hear on the podcast.

UPDATE: ok I had some time to finish this (funny how you have time when you are not driving 6 hours a day, on my second day off and I feel like I have been on vacation for 4 days.) the podcast is up and there. sorry about it being around 7 meg in size.