Sound Recording

[shoebox]

Hi everybody, I know very little about sound recording. My focus is on capturing sounds for surveillance/security use. I thought maybe a high quality sound recorder would be the way to go rather than a security system. That being said, can anyone recommend any equipment?

Ideally I need to be able to retrieve the recording at the exact time it occurred. For instance I start a recording at 2pm on a certain date...I need to be able to go say 2:30 pm when a time occurred, and have that time displayed. Furthermore, I know I could just calculate how many minutes have gone by when the recording started, but for memory purposes, i would like to cut out irrelevant sections.

Thanks!

[kozikowski]

Audacity doesn't make a very good surveillance recorder. Right up front it doesn't do time stamping, so the best we can do is recommend an external timecode generator to put time on one of the stereo tracks with the show on the other. Then, of course, you'll need a reader for playback. Recently, Audacity wouldn't go over 13 hours, although I think that's been solved. Audacity will not loop like a surveillance recorder. It won't automatically Save A Day at the 24-hour mark and start over.

You may find that normal computers won't work for surveillance, either. Oops. Sorry. Windows decided to do an update and the recording crashed.

You may also find that most of the audio quality issues are not the recorder but cheap microphones and awful recording environments. Audacity has trouble with those just like everybody else. Nobody is going to get a theatrical recording done in a parking garage.

Koz