Interesting Technology

For Christmas, I got a 4 track portable digital recorder (Zoom H2) for field recording. It will record in both MP3 and Wave formats in stereo, mono, or 4 track. In addition, there is software to convert 4 track into 5 track surround sound. The main purpose for me will be to record live music. I used it last weekend at the Snow Hill Blues Jam and it worked great. It writes to an internal 2 gig SD card. I used 2 cards to record the whole 4 hours of the concert in cd quality wave format. Then I used a card reader to move the files onto my hard drive where I manipulated them with music production software and then burned them on CDs. For instance, there was a lot of crowd noise but I was able to use a vocal reduction feature to remove some of this low level noise without negatively affecting the vocals of the musicians. The unit is about 2.5 x 4 x 1.25 inches and contains 4 microphones, 2 on each side. By selecting 4 track, you can effectively record the ambience of the hall. Neat little tool!