Recording with an iBook

[Keith Rowland]

I'm thinking GarageBand is a little over kill for simple recording. How 
about trying a simple recorder program like "Audio Recorder". It fires 
up and simply starts recording to an audio file, whatever audio input 
device you've selected. You can select raw AIFF audio files or MP3 
encoding on the fly.

Available at:   http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17392

> A) what format to save it to in order to burn a cd.

If you are wanting to burn a CD, you can of course use iTunes. Now if 
you have lots of space, record it in the correct CD format and iTunes 
won't have to convert it. Select the raw AIFF 44.1 Khz stereo. But for 
limited space, you can select the MP3 format for recording, pick your 
quality level, and then add it to the iTunes library. When itunes is to 
burn an AUDIO CD, it will expand it back to raw uncompressed audio on 
the disk. You can store lots of recordings in mp3 with iTunes.

Keep in mind however, that you'll want to stop the recording every 
hour, so the file can fit on one CD. If you want to make an MP3 CD, 
then you can burn more than one hour on a disk. You could then burn 
several lectures on a single CD. This would only play on a MP3 capable 
CD player or computer of course.

> B) What size of file will it be if it's an hour and a half to two hour 
> talk

Depends on the selected quality level and Mono/Stereo settings. Lower 
quality, smaller file. For voice, you'd be able to record lots of hours 
at the voice quality setting.

> C) Is it workable to record such a length of audio and not completely 
> bog down the system?  I'm not looking for professional quality, though 
> this would be great if it were possible, if this will be an impediment 
> to the system. "Good enough" will be good enough.

The issue is going to be the acoustics of the room. Recording with the 
internal microphone, 10-20 feet away from the speaker, won't sound very 
good. It would serve you better to have an externally wired microphone 
placed within a few feet of the speaker and plugged into the mac input 
to record. If this is not possible, at least set the iBook on the table 
in front of the speaker, or sit as close as you can. That will do more 
for making the recording sound better, than the setting of the 
software, which can be set as high quality as you want.

> Most important, since my hard drive is only 10 gb, can I install GB on 
> my 15 gb iPod and run it off of there (connected to the iBook, of 
> course)?

There's another option, get the voice recorder device from Griffin that 
turns your iPod into a recorder.