[dag655321]

I am looking for recommendations for a small inexpensive Digital Audoi Player which has line in recording capability. It does not need to be great quality, but wav recording (as opposed to mp3 of wma) would be nice. I would take any kind of recording though.

It looks like the Toshiba Gigabeat U would fit the bill, but 2 GB of memory and line in recording, but is there anything else out there I should consider?

Thanks.

 

[trickywombat]

Take a look at the iriver iHP series of MP3 players which haven't been manufactured for a few years. You can get a 20 GB (iriver iHP-120) on ebay for around $150. It has both analog line in and optical digital in. With Rockbox installed, you can choose to record in PCM Wave and AIFF, the losslessly compressed WavPack and the lossy MPEG Layer 3. The 40 GB iHP-140 costs more and is harder to find on ebay.

$150 is a better deal than most new players out there, and you get OPTICAL inputs and outputs as well plus Rockboxability. Some Head-Fi members have a few of these irivers EACH.

 

[shigzeo]

i still would go for a dedicated recorder like a flash based from m-audio or such. also, md. they have far better and clean line in that do the iriver hp series. if you are serious about recording, the iriver will be too limiting.

we tried at my job for long time and eventually found it much better to directly hook up the microphone to a battery box and the line in from an external soundcard.

md is easy but you have to then convert to wav or mp3 but at least it does not rely on the innards of an mp3 player to convert straight to mp3. we haven't much an idea which codec the irivers use to code and when we used the old fat ones with the joystick, we had very mixed results of quality and usability. the optical in is a great gimic though and so too the optical out.