Has anyone used a laptop etc for recording fieldwork interviews? If so, what software did you use and was it better or worse than using traditional tapes etc when you actually do the interviews and critically when you need to transcribe them?
Cheers
JAmes

hello
i am not sure i understood what u asking.

are u asking about using digital recorders as opposed to the traditional cassette player? i used both and the 1st one is by far better.

the digital recorder is coming with its software so you can transfer you r recoridngs to the pc
hope it helps
d

Hi James

I've recorded with my laptop using a cheap Logitech microphone and the free open source software Audacity (you can find it at sourceforge.net . Quality is generally reasonable, although do a test run first. You can save files as mp3s but you need to download an additional encoder called lame.dll (just put download lame.dll into Google). This is fine, provided you are not moving around or interviewing a group.

For other interviews, I used a relatively inexpensive digital voice recorder (cost £40) which holds up to 2 and a half hours of reasonable quality audio. I used an Olympus VN-480 PC model.

Both options were fine when it came to transcribing. Hope this helps.

Audacity software here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

Lame.dll for mp3 files here:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Lame_Encoder.htm

Olympus VN 480 (now cheaper):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Olympus-VN-480-Digital-voice-recorder/dp/B0002DEZSS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1197668692&sr=8-1

Thanks for that advice. When you came to transcribe how easy was it using digital files? A friend of mine used tapes and then had a very good transcription machine with a foot pedal to stop and start playback - did you use a similar device for the digital files?
Thanks
J

*laughing* No, no foot pedals, just the pause and rewind buttons. *grin* Sufficed for me. I guess it depends what you want, really.