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Media (Apple) Businesses Media Apple

Audio Recording on New iPods 75

Posted by pudge from the we-are-listening dept.
Vertig0gitreV writes "Over at iPodding they are reporting that in the Diagnostic Mode of the new new iPods (released on the 28th of May) there are two options for audio recording: mono through the headphone jack, and a stereo line-in through the docking port via the yet-to-be-announced line-in adaptor."
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Audio Recording on New iPods More

Audio Recording on New iPods

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  • Unofficially confirmed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erik K. Veland ( 574016 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @09:45AM (#5868540) Homepage
    An Apple rep has already confirmed (off the record) that this will be an accessory to come the next months.

    One can wonder why they didn't out it as a feature though.

  • in a word: Finally! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03, 2003 @09:51AM (#5868554)
    Yes! This feature has been a long time coming and finally brings recording to the iPod, which has been lacking it compared to Nomad and Archos. Now I can record samples and concerts with something small and unobtrusive -- if expensive. I imagine the new iPod will find many interesting new uses with the docking port, such as loading into a car stereo. Anyways check out earth2willi.com [earth2willi.com] for lots of free music downloads to install on your new iPod! It's registration and advertisement free, untouched by the RIAA, available in various genre and fileformats, and uncrippled by DRM.
    • They already have a car stereo adapter that uses radio frequencies through a transmitter. You can find it at the Apple Store site. Dunno how much more affective it will be as opposed to a plain tape adapter ive been using that i got with my discman a while back. But atleast its there.
      • yeah, I have a small 'iSomething' radio modulator and it is cool, but they are generally somewhat weak signal strength and can get interference from lightning, radio broadcast, RF noise, etc. Then if you also want to use a DC adapter you have more cables hanging off the iPod. With a car stereo 'dock' you could just shove the iPod in like a VCR tape and maybe use some controls on a faceplate or something, while using the dock connector to pass control commands into the iPod, charge the battery, and do a di
  • If only this had leaked a few months later...

    I have been reading about other competitors being ready with Windows couterparts to Apple iTunes Music Store by the time Apple ported iTunes to Windows. This would have been another surprise at that time.

    Well, but then Apple would have known people will dis-assemble iPods. Does it mean they were planning to release it right around now, and were not ready?

  • New Input mode (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slowtech ( 12134 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @10:41AM (#5868695)
    I have been looking into using the iPod as a PDA (read only, of course), and I am really excited about this. With this feature you can either take audio notes on the run, or, if there is enough processor power for voice recognition, enter information into the Calendar / Address Book, etc.

    There is also a third option, which would be neat, to record the audio onto the iPod disk, and then have your Mac transcribe the audio when the iPod hooks up. This could be a work around if the iPod does not have the computing capacity for taking voice input.

    This would be so like Apple - they know we are all getting just a little sick of Graffitti and scribbling tiny marks on a tiny screen. Voice recognition / recording would make the iPod a PDA with a unique and convenient interface.

    • Re:New Input mode (Score:3, Insightful)

      by slowtech ( 12134 )
      Why gosh, slowtech, that is quite interesting. I imagine that there are a lot of people out there, like you and I, who lust for an iPod, but can't justify $300 for a portable music player. But, of course, if you can replace your PDA, and have a portable music player, and a small home stereo system (the iPod cradle can be hooked into powered speakers), then that is a real deal.

      Too bad you didn't think to put that in your original comment, eh?
    • I don't know though, this is like the wrist phones where you are walking around talking into your hand. There are some applications, but generally I don't believe its practical.

    • Re:New Input mode (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Genevish ( 93570 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @07:05PM (#5871147) Homepage
      Apple has recently been awarded patents relating to improved speech recognition. Could this be the next "insanely great thing"?

      http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2003/03/200303020 15 701.shtml

      -Scott

    • Re:New Input mode (Score:4, Funny)

      by Unregistered ( 584479 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @09:54PM (#5871965)
      great, so everyone will TALK to their PDAs in meetings. That won't be annoying at all, i'm sure.

  • Other New feature in the new iPods (Score:5, Informative)

    by gadwale ( 46632 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @11:11AM (#5868796) Homepage
    There seem to be new features in the iPods that weren't announced or well publicized. From my earlier post here [slashdot.org]:

    While reading Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal I came upon this paragraph:

    "The standard cable still hooks into a FireWire, or 1394, a port many Macs have but few Windows PCs include. So, Apple offers an alternate cable for $19 that plugs into the USB 2.0 port that's standard equipment on new Windows PCs. It will also work, albeit much more slowly, with the older USB ports found on nearly every Windows PC in the past four years. This opens up many more Windows computers for working with the iPod."

    Went to the Apple website and sure enough - The new iPod dock can now connect to a USB 2.0 port on Windows machines [apple.com]. What is more - you can also use a USB 1.1 port for _really_ slow transfers!

    From Apple Website:
    "USB 2.0
    For PC users, the iPod will be able to sync files via USB 2.0*, which transfers data at up to 480 Mbps and comes standard on the latest Windows computers. USB 2.0 is also compatible with USB 1.1, although data transfer speeds are much slower."

    Looks like a smart move...

    Adi Gadwale.
    • Thanks for the info; it looks like that should work with older Macs as well, like my relatives have.

      • Thanks for the info; it looks like that should work with older Macs as well, like my relatives have.

        Hmm...I don't know about that. AFAIK, the only supported software is iTunes for OS X, and (blech!) MusicMatch Jukebox for Windows -- so, while the interface may be compatable, there'd be no way to make use of it.

        Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
        • Looking at my father's iMac rev/B, I see iPod Firewire drivers for iTunes 2 in OS 9.22. Perhaps the NEW iPods wouldn't work with it, but I don't see why not. On the other hand, I don't think there will be AAC support in OS 9. Of course, he COULD install OS X on this machine, but he's waiting for a new one, after I find a job...

        • Though I have yet to have the opportunity to buy an iPod (I'm poor :) ), I have heard that the ipod can be mounted as an external hard drive, if one wants it to be done in such a way. If this is so, then one running OS 9 could simply mount it and use the Finder to move their mp3s onto it. This is purely hearsay, though.
          • yes you can load your MP3's in HD mode, but the software on the iPod cannot see those files to play them. You have to load them through iTunes (or MusicMatch) for the iPod to play them. Of course there may be 3rd party apps that will work, but the only ones I can think of are for getting songs off of the iPod onto a 2nd Mac.
      • But they'll be discouraged from updating their iPods due to the extremely slow transfer speeds, and they'll wind up using it less, and it will be less valuable to them.

        For $20, you can get a firewire card for just about any mac/pc/whatever. Since it vastly improves the utility of a $200-$500 product, I'd say it's worth it.

    • Re:Other New feature in the new iPods (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Space Coyote ( 413320 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @07:59PM (#5871424) Homepage
      Heh, for ~$19 you can buy yourself a firewire PCI card as well. You'd be pretty daft not to get that instead of the special USB 2.0 cable.
      • A lot of new PCs are finally catching up with the Macs and have on-board FireWire.
      • Er, not so daft really. I've got a laptop without firewire, a PC at work without firewire, my folk's PC and inlaw's PC (when we travel back home) without firewire, and friends without firewire. So then... one $19 cable, or one $19 PCI card (plus one $xx PCMCIA card) which I need to insert and remove each time I want to load a few tracks?

        Don't get me wrong -- I love firewire and have it on our machines at home... but that's only because we have DV camcorders. Sadly, most PC users have no other use for it
      • Good point that FireWire is widely superior to USB, but ordering a cable (in addition to a FW card if you don't own one) might not be such a bad idea: the new iPods don't come with cables to connect them "straight" into a FireWire jack - for that, you have to use the included dock.

        As taking the dock with me is not what I would call "music on the go", the direct ipod-to-firewire cable looked to me as a necessity. Guess what: both the iPod-FW and the iPod-FW/USB cables (see ipod accessories [apple.com]) cost the same: 1

  • iPod at the practice session.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by naelurec ( 552384 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @11:38AM (#5868905) Homepage
    This could be VERY cool. Assuming that the input can work as a line in, I could see hooking up a nice set of mics to a mixer, run it into the ipod and use it as a very quick and easy recording setup for band practices. Download the resulting MP3/WAV files and email them out to band members. :) (or perhaps come up with some funky script that would de-hiss the recording, compress it slightly, etc)
    • Yah, I'm a vinyl DJ and have been wanting this ever since I heard of the iPod. Plug the mixer into it and record sets on the fly. Would come in handy at gigs. Right now my recording capabilities require an unholy combination of OS 9 & X tools. And of course the OS9 stuff I need doesn't work under classic, so it's reboot reboot. I hope the recording software will have automatic record and pause features too although maybe that's too much for the processor.

      Ah well, time to reboot into OS 9; I have a

      • Re:exactly! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by cei ( 107343 )
        Not specific to recording, but since you mention you're a dj, did you notice that iTunes 4 has a BPM field in the ID3 tag now? If you were "spinning" mp3s, could make organizing your library easier. Don't know. I'm not a dj, but I thought it was a cool, yet unmentioned, addition.
        • Cool! What would be really cool is if it were automatically calculated during compression to mp3; I doubt we'll see too many people using that field until then...
          • Ok, a week later, I know, but maybe you're checking for replies... Someone posted a new app to versiontracker that lets you tap the tempo and it calculates the BPM... here [versiontracker.com]
    • Not to mention all of the people who record concerts (either with or without the band's consent.)

      There's a huge number of people who currently use DAT technology for capturing shows. Using an iPod would be very attractive for two reasons: 1) You don't have a tape to flip half way through the show and 2) it doesn't look like a recording device to the security folks.
    • Exactly what I was thinking. I have been looking into minidisc recorders (because that's what everyone else seems to be using), but this looks like a much better option than MD.

  • Voice recognition? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @05:36PM (#5870666) Homepage
    If they've got line (or mic) in, how much further can voice recognition be? Imagine an AUI (Aural User Interface):

    "iPod, play Pink Floyd, album Dark Side of the Moon."

    Might be a nice alternative to the scroll wheel, cool as it is.

    • Re:Voice recognition? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by extra88 ( 1003 )
      And if we're really lucky, it'll have its own speech capability so it can reply, "not right now 'Cheech,' I'm going to play The Clash instead."

      But seriously folks, I don't think that's very realistic. Sure, they are phones now which can accept voice commands but they require training and have a very limited vocabulary. The kind of recognition you're talking about is a lot closer to understanding continuous speech, something which is a lot harder and requires a lot more processing to do well.

      More feasible
      • Probably only limited voice recognition with the hardware available.

        IIRC the iPod has an ARM processor in the 60-90 MIPS range. This could get you continuous speech recognition with a vocabulary of a few thousand words, but you'd probably need more RAM. Even if I'm wrong about the processor speed you'd probably still need more RAM.

        It wouldn't be hard to get a hundred word vocabulary discrete word recognition, to do perhaps:

        "iPod" pause "play" pause "metal" (or whatever)

        Disclaimer: I have programmed a l

    • Re:Voice recognition? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03, 2003 @11:35PM (#5872386)
      As a non-iPod related side note, I've got this working with iTunes and my iMac (and its built-in mic). With the help of this Applescript [macosxhints.com] and a Keyspan Digital Media Remote [keyspan.com] I can control iTunes by voice across the room, almost exactly as your example there is set up.

      But, to be honest, I don't know if a system similar to OS X's built-in voice recognition could be used with an iPod, at least conveniently. At least, with the Applescript linked above, on my 800MHz G4 it takes about three to five seconds to load the names of 128 artists to recognize. It would take significantly longer to do so on the iPod. (I guess the names could be held in RAM to make it quicker.)

  • Hoping for Mic and Flash drive (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Recording capabilities and the ability to store pics from my digital camera are two things I was looking forward to seeing in the new iPod revision. Hopefully, Apple plans to implement both using the dock connector.

    Imagine sleds similar to those iPaqs have. One sled contains a mic and other connections for recording, another sled acts as a flash memory reader, while another is simply an additional battery (Belkin already makes an extra battery pack this but it seems rather inelegant). I can even see App

  • Wonder how they avoid spinning the disk. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Saturday May 03, 2003 @07:13PM (#5871203) Journal
    They'll have to buffer audio in the 32MB RAM, compress it, and when the RAM fills up, spin the HD and write it down. If they've got decent MP3(AAC?) encoding hardware on it, then they might not need to buffer the incoming audio at all, in which case I imagine they could avoid spinning the disk more often than once every twenty minutes or so.

    If they pull that off, you could get hours and hours and hours of recording time on a single charge. Er... but idunno about the power requirements of a decent mic. This might not be everything a bootlegger dreamed of, but close to it. They'll probably still need to carry around some kind of power source to drive their mic. Any audio folks out there to illuminate the issue?

    • Re:Wonder how they avoid spinning the disk. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There is a lot of decent dynamic microphones (self-powered microphones) on the marked. But these work best with song/speech. If you want to record enviromental sound you would need a condenser mic, which needs 48v phantom power. AKG [akg.com] has a lot of good dynamic and condenser microphones
    • >Er... but idunno about the power requirements of a decent mic.

      Well, I went back and looked in one of my manuals to see what the differences are, and mics can be powered with 3 volts (granted, this varies on model and make, but the theory is there), BUT, the voltage effects the mics output. Many "plugin power" sets on recorders (and in this case the ipod), send 3-4 volts which is sufficient.

      The catch comes with that mics operate best (and can capture the high end range from ~15khz upward) when they are
    • The stereo microphone I use with my minidisk runs off two AA batteries.
    • To make it very short:
      1. Professional (studio) microphones usually need phantom power (11 - 48 volts) on a balanced type connector (XLR for example), usually monophonic.
      2. Bias voltage (1.5 - 9V) is used with small, portable microphones like the ones people connect to portable minidisc recorders or professional tape recorders. All portable devices of that kind I've used have it on the mic input port - unbalanced stereo 3.5mm connector type.
      3. Professional (stage) microphones are either passive (like the omn

  • It has been in hardware from the start (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03, 2003 @10:09PM (#5872011)
    It has been in hardware (processor) from the first iPods, however, this 3rd generation iPod finally has the hardware connection and initial rudamentary software connection to take advantage of it. I think that coupled with the notes feature, which has also been refered to as "museum mode," and the "experiments in education," Apple is preparing the iPod for more vertical markets.

    It'll be interesting to see what iPodding finds when they conduct the take-apart. I imagine that this one will be far more optimized since it is significantly smaller than the first two generations and uses specialized connections. The design process of the last one was designed to take advantage of "off the shelf" components.
    • Actually, according to ipodding.com in this [ipodding.com] article, the classic iPod cannot encode in analog.

      Classic (Scroll/TouchWheel) iPods use the Wolfson Microelectronics WM8721 DAC (digital to analog converter) and can not encode analog (audio) input into digital (MP3, ACC, etc....) The WM8721 has line output capability, however, that wasn't implimented in Classic iPods. The new iPod (with dock connector) not only has line output, but as we've demonstrated it also has stereo line and mic input.

      When going ca

  • I'm wondering what makes the most sense. Someone at the sound desk live encoding an aac file with drm and serving it up to one of Apple's servers, or a truck full of CD recorders parked out back of a venue producing, hmm exactly how many do they produce? 50, 100, 1000? and then running around to the main gate and selling them as people are leaving the show. Don't know about you but I get goosebumps imagining being able to download last nights Yes concert somewhere in Europe for $9.99 while I get ready to g
    • The server solution definitely makes more sense.

      With the disc farm, you're selling a product (canned) to people who just bought the same product (live). Put on the apple store, and the same product is available to the remaining 6 billion souls on the rock.

      Add in a subscribe/notify mode and some of us (I'm) probably just obsessed enough to download every concert the next morning.

      Glad to see another Yes freak on /. Now just imagine telling your wife "I just paid 9.99 for my 20th live version of Starshi


  • It just occurred to me that the connector lin-in option may open the door for a AM/FM add-on cartridge...
  • I got the new iPod anyway on the Friday when it came out. It's very cool - and I already like it better than my old CD-based MP3 player.
    It's pricy, but I also saw the value in a portable hard drive that just happens to play music too.
    Recording equipment would just make this my killer app - er... killer hardware. See, I'm studying journalism next semester, and my shorthand sucks. Inteviews recorded digitally - and archivable, would rock my box, even if it isn't actual rock music we're talking about.
  • "iPod also includes a notes reader that lets you download text-based information and read it on the screen. This way you can have the information you need ? on everything from restaurant reviews to nightlife guides, and from news articles to exercise routines at your fingertips". http://www.apple.com/ipod [apple.com]

    Sounds to me like they are evolving into a PDA one feature at a time. The BIG movement will be two-fold: new screen and input mechanism, and programmability (or use Newton applications). Sorry, no iWalk.

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