I found a nice, new tech tool for all those budding podcasters out there: The Califone Personal Media Player 8101. No, it’s not as cool-looking as an iPod, but it is extremely functional. Here’s my quick pros / cons list, for a more in-depth review, scroll down a bit:
Pros:
- Battery Life is excellent – upwards of 6 to 8 hours recording/playing time, if not more. (I never was able to run it all the way down!)
- Two headphone jacks – no splitter needed for use with two students.
- Memory/storage – built-in 512 megabytes plus an SD card slot for expansion.
- Light – it’s a little larger than I’d like, but the unit is very light.
- Recording – built-in microphone for recording podcasts, lectures, interviews, etc.
Cons: my only beef is that the recording quality could be bit better.
In-depth review: The Califone 8101 experience:
Unpacked – includes USB cable, headphones, and unit. Great!
First impressions – Good size, for smaller or larger hands. Buttons clearly marked and easy to figure out what functionality is. Very light for its size. Headphones acceptable and have volume adjustment for independent levels.
Instructions: no ‘step-by-step’ that teachers would appreciate, but then again I really didn’t need it. You plug it into your computer, it recognized it and started charging.
Manual – nice size, but type is SMALL! I’m only 39 and I had some problems focusing on the micro-sized type. Note to Califone: PLEASE increase your font size!
Recording: recorded for an hour, didn’t miss a beat and I don’t see any wear on the battery. Already better battery life than 30gig iPod for recording – might be because of no moving parts – flash memory vs. HD. Audio quality is OK. I wish the sample rate was just a bit higher than 8kHz. Bitrate of 32bps works – mono is fine since it only has one microphone. The WAV format is nice. 1 hour = 14.megs – nice sizing. Still says I have 69 hours left on my 1gig SD card. My first recording try was in a meeting. Two ‘low-volume’ talkers and one more boisterous person. I would suggest positioning the device strategically for the volume of each person’s voice as there is no ‘auto-gain’ available. You can’t win them all.
I took the recorder to several venues including very large, auditorium spaces as well as small, conference room spaces to test it out. While it did pick up sound in the larger areas, recording quality was much better in the smaller venues like a conference room or an interview situation. The quality of the recording isn’t up to par like an iPod/Belkin Tune Talk combination, but if you are careful about placement and background noise, you can get acceptable recordings from this device – and with just a little tweak here and there in Audacity (or your favorite audio editing program) you can make good-sounding recordings.
Another bonus: it has a removable SD card so you can expand the built-in 512 megs of storage space. It’s simple to use as both the internal memory shows up as individual drives on your computer. To load it up with your favorite music or audio book just takes a drag of the audio files onto the card or internal storage.
Overall, the Califone mp3 player is a great little device. I would certainly recommend it to anyone needing an ‘all-in-one’ recorder/player. While I’m not 100% pleased with the audio recording quality, I am astounded by the battery life – it’s incredible! (I didn’t run it all the way down, but I was able to record at least 6 to 8 hours on a single charge.)
This device is worth checking out.
