# MP3 Voice Recorder



## HuguenotHelpMeet (Nov 3, 2008)

For those of you who record sermons at your church for sermonaudio, I was just wondering if you might be able to suggest a good quality, inexpensive voice recorder.

On the one we are using currently, the recordings have to be converted to MP3 format before uploading. We would like to possibly alleviate that step so that others in the church can easily do the uploading without having to pass the conversion software from person to person.

Thanks for any help and advice.


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## Kenneth_Murphy (Nov 3, 2008)

If you go with a more expensive recorder, you could also get Dragon Natually Speaking 10 and train it to your voice and have it auto transcribe your sermon into text. You would need to go back and proof read it but it shouldn't take very long. Though if you did it this way you would still need to convert the audito to mp3 as a seperate step. The DNS software will do a better job listening to the raw format audio than an mp3.


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## Semper Fidelis (Nov 3, 2008)

HuguenotHelpMeet said:


> For those of you who record sermons at your church for sermonaudio, I was just wondering if you might be able to suggest a good quality, inexpensive voice recorder.
> 
> On the one we are using currently, the recordings have to be converted to MP3 format before uploading. We would like to possibly alleviate that step so that others in the church can easily do the uploading without having to pass the conversion software from person to person.
> 
> Thanks for any help and advice.



Jessica,

We had a recorder at the Church I attended in Okinawa that worked well: Amazon.com: Zoom H4 Handy Recorder: Musical Instruments

It was pretty high end. I'm not necessarily recommending it to you but I do want to make sure you understand what you can/can't reasonably expect out of recordings that you intend to put on the web.

To conserve bandwidth and space on the server, I recommend MP3 encoding at about 32 kbits/s. It maintains pretty good voice quality (no garbling). For the task I use dbPowerAmp.

What I would never do, however, is record a sermon at 32 kbps? Why? Because I would want a better quality version saved for archive purposes and only put my 32 kbps on the web but, also, because voice recorders don't typically have an option to record at a lower bitrate or, if they do, their encoders aren't necessarily all that great.

Encoding is the process of converting an Analog to a Digital signal. The better the encoder, the more money on a hardware device. You're not likely to find an inexpensive handheld recorder that will do an acceptable job of encoding voice at 32 kpbs.

If you have a recorder that already records to digital format, you might find you're not really skipping a step and that you'll still have to convert the format from one MP3 bitrate to another.

Can you explain your exact workflow now so I can get a sense of what your bottlenecks are?


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## toddpedlar (Nov 3, 2008)

I've got an olympus WS-331M, which is VERY compact, and quite good in recording quality... not exactly an MP3 recorder, though, if that was really what you wanted. It records a nice WMA format, (multiple bit rates are selectable) and can be loaded onto your PC simply by plugging it in (it's essentially a thumb drive with recording equipment on it). I also use it as an MP3 player, and that quality is reasonably decent (for sermons & such - never tried music). I got it for about $125 or something - it's slightly cheaper now.


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