Help with Audio Bible Recording

This Christmas, I will be blessed by heading down to the interior or Mexico to work on recording the New Testament into Huichol, an indigenous Mexican language. These will likely be distributed on MegaVoice Ambassador portable solar-powered mp3 players. A local church here in Phoenix has offered to donate the microphone; however, I am looking for the recording device itself. I hesitate to record onto a laptop computer because of the noise that I have found associated with all of the onboard electronics (not to mention I don't have too many laptops lying around). After doing a little bit of budget conscious research I am considering ordering the Sony MZ-RH10 (manual can be found here) for recording onto Hi-MD minidiscs. If I cannot get a compatible microphone from a church here, I will likely order this as well. I get free two-day shipping from Amazon, so I will still be able to get it here before I leave. Any advice regarding these devices would be greatly appreciated.

Even if you are unable to help technically, please offer your support by praying for this project. There are many thousands in the mountains who have never heard the Gospel and don't have access to the Scriptures. Likewise, many who may have access to a Huichol Bible and desire to read it cannot. Please pray that this recording project would be successful, that the funding would be available to produce the devices, and ultimately that they would be used to bring people into contact with God through the Word of God, both bringing people to saving faith and edifying those who have already been granted repentance and faith.

Sony may have dealt with the compatibility issue on the Minidisc. I hope so.

They claim “Compatible audio format: MP3, ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, WMA, WAV”. But in the past this has meant you need all kinds of other equipment to get the signal from Sony’s proprietary form into the WAV form that you want for archiving and future production (it’s the only one that won’t be superseded over time, because it’s just the bare wave as it comes from the amplifier), or into the MP3 form for production (and be aware that iTunes now converts to MP4 format, not MP3).

The good old Sony Digital Audio Tape recorder is still what people prefer for work in the field.

You might do well to call their engineering division. The sales people probably don’t know; they just sell consumer electronics.

—Joe

by: Joe G. - 19 11 '05 - 10:55

According to the user manual, analog recording sources can be outputted to regular wav audio cds. Upon calling Sony, I was advised that if this is the intended output format for later compression that we record in linear PCM format (which I believe is itself a true .wav file as PCM, pulse code modulation, is nothing but the raw digital sampling). I was assured by Sony that this would work for our purposes. I am contacting current users who have left detailed reviews of the product to see if they believe that to be accurate.

I currently use Acoustica (www.acondigital.com) which has professional Fraunhoffer mp3 codec licensing for my conversions. So getting to mp3 won’t be tough.

The thing is that I don’t want to spend more money than I have to. While it looks like this will work, I don’t want to buy it if something for less money will suffice equally as well. Joe, let me know if you think that this is the case and if so what kind of thing I should be looking for. I want the recording to be digitized within whatever device we use rather than in the computer, because to do otherwise would add a second level of noise before digitization.

Or perhaps it would be ok to simply record directly onto a computer using Acoustica or other software’s record functions.

-Jacob

by: Jacob Hantla () (URL) - 19 11 '05 - 10:55

I went ahead and ordered it.

by: Jacob () (URL) - 21 11 '05 - 08:11

Our NTs are recorded on a computer with a sound card, Tube pre-amp, and an SM-58 Shure microphone. We’ve been told that the recordings have been very clean.

An SIL friend bought an Edirol USB pre-amp interface that seemed to work pretty well. The mike plugs into the Edirol.

We use Cool-Edit, Cool-Edit Pro, and Adobe Audition for recording/editing. While we’re recording a chapter on one program, we edit the precious chapter on a different program while on the same computer screen. That has saved a lot of time.

Audacity is a program that is downloadable and free.

You’re going to need to look for a quiet location, where you can add some additional sound-proofing. If you use an SM-58 mike, it won’t pick-up a lot of the room noise, but the reader needs to be close to the mike and off to the side.

With marginal readers, you need to make sure that they read short phrases well and stop at natural pauses, commas, and periods. Many readers will want to ramble and stop when they run out of breath. If you record that way, the editing will be a nightmare.

by: Jim Loker - 21 11 '05 - 08:39

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Title: Help with Audio Bible Recording
Date posted: 19 11 '05 - 07:59
Category: Journal
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