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simchapup

Lighting Technician
Hey everyone i have to many questions this one is about if i take my mixer and plug a voice recorder into the outputs to record from my mixer how good will it sound i want to be able to record from my mixer without using my laptop
 
depends on the voice recorder. If the inputs are mic level and you plug into Line level outputs, you'll want to make sure your outputs are very low or have an inline pad.
If it's opposite, you'll have the opposite problem and need to amplify the signal with a preamp or turn up the inputs on your recorder.

The ideal situation is to pair mic or line outputs with same-kind inputs.

The other question is whether you want to record in stereo and whether you have the capability to do so.
 
Some of the cable adapters being talked about here: http://www.controlbooth.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3657 might make your life alot easier doing this.

I would think that if your recorder is stereo, a cable with a 1/8" stereo male plug on one end and two 1/4" mono (right and left) male plugs on the other end would be ideal. (you also have the option of using RCA inplace of the 1/4" and buying RCA to 1/4" adapters too.... that way you have flexability to record from RCA if necessary).

Theoretically, baring the line/mic level issues above, recording in a manner similar to what you are talking about is very feasable, although the final quality will largely depend on the recording qualty of the voice recorder. (A little $15 voice recorder isnt going to sound NEARLY as good as a device specifially made for professional recording)

If you have model info on your voice recorder so we can take a look at it, it would be very helpful too.
 
Go with whatever you can afford then, because a digital recorder with a decent sample rate is at least $300.
 
hmmm... that one kinda scares me because i cannot find any information regarding it's recording quality / sample rate anywhere. It seems to be primaraly an Mp3 player with a "bonus feature" of mp3 recording. Although that is going to be mostly what you find out there, what you are looking to do is really a niche market with very little insentive for companies to make what you are looking for. I'll take a few mins here and try to find some of the mp3 recorders I was looking at a while back.

** time passes **

Ok... At the moment I cannot find them. The one thing that I did rediscover right now is that "Voice Recorders" REALLY are not what your looking for. Most of the ones that I looked only record VERY narrow frequency bands (the frequencies that people talk at) and at VERY low bitrates which sound ok for talking but will almost certainly sound rather bad for music.

One alternative to look into is MiniDisc recorders. Those tend to be abit better, but it might be tough finding one that you can copy the digital files to your computer from b/c sony had a whole big deal about them being "good" because you could not transfer music from pt. A to pt. B with them (to make the music industry happy). I'll try to take a look again later on for ya.
 
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Wait. Why don't you want to use your laptop? Unless you're running other software on it, just by yourself a decent interface and go with that. Unless you're using something quite old, given your price range, it's your best bet. Tapco (mackie), Line 6 and tascam all have low end interfaces that will surely work for you.

Do you own an ipod? There's a interface for those, I wanna say it has the word griffin in it, that does decent recording. At least 16-bit, but I think 24. It'll record to any hard drive actually, not just an ipod.
 
you have to test your laptop first. yes, your laptop may be better then many of these voice recorders, however laptops tend to be "noisey" with hisses and crackles picked up from the other circuitry in the computer. Annother thing to keep an eye out for is that many laptops have ground hum issues so you may want to try recording with or without the laptop pluged into the wall and see if one way is better then the other. If you already have a laptop, giving it a try is certainly worth a try before you go putting money into something else. Maybe you'll luck out and have a laptop with a good sound card!
 
Try to find an old used Roland VS-880 or similar. When I record live things (I did a Phantom medley that came out awesome) I plug in four pre-fader aux sends to the inputs of the 880. I just match up similar instruments (or give each it's own) so I can mix it and master it later.
 

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