S60 Multimedia Blog

November 22, 2006 S60 as mobile recording studio Posted by Oren at 10:16 AM | Categories: Applications, Music

Darla reports about the first music EP recorded on a mobile phone, and interviewed the composer, Omri Levy. Omri used the Alon MP3 Dictaphone propgram to record his 10-song EP "about:blank" on his Nokia N80.

The Alon software records MP3 files up to 96kbps @ 16 kHz. That's more or less FM radio quality (but of course the phone microphone is not exactly what you would find in a studio). I'm trying to find out more technical details about how Omri did the recording, and will report back what I learn.

Update: Omri reports that he did indeed use the N80 microphone and the maximum settings of the Alon software. He writes: "I know that the sound quality is far from being perfect but if i wanted a 'perfect sound' I would have used my own studio. In most cases I would rather listen to someone recording himself on a 4-track than listen to a bright and shiny production. So the Nokia N80 was more than enough for me." (On his wishlist: overdubbing on the phone)

Let me know if you come across other mobile recordings. Maybe this is a new tool for the Lo-Fi world?

-Oren

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Comments

You can't use the built-in voice recorder because that limits you to one minute AMR. Why? Many people buy mp3 players that have voice recorders built in so they can record lectures or interviews. The limit for video used to be around one minute, but that was upped soon after the 7610, so why not the voice recorder as well?

@Margaret: I agree that the one-minute limit doesn't make sense. The max. length in Voice Recorder goes up to 60 minutes in S60 3rd Edition FP1, in devices like the N95 (coming early next year). If you want to record to MP3, however, a program like the Alon tool is still your best bet.

what are good options for being able to connect a better (real) microphone to your N-series?

@ Oren:
Why not limited by the free memory in microSD??
Why only 60 minutes and not all the available memory of the device??

@PanosM: Good question. That was the decision made by the product team - I don't know all of the reasoning behind it. I think we can expect the max. time to increase in future releases of S60.

Probably nobody wanted to change the UI to support hh:mm:ss instead of mm:ss...?

S60 Open to new features

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