Audio Recording and PDA’s

While continuing my research on portable recording devices, I discovered that the iriver HP-120 limits recording to 790MB for WAV and 195 for MP3’s. That leads me to investigate other possibilities, including the very intriguing PDAudio. Basically, it’s a CF/PC card that attaches to your PDA device, along with audio recording software. The cool thing is that storage capabilities are becoming bigger and cheaper. Coresound.com site writes:

Some folks have asked about the cost of the media that PDAudio uses to store WAV files. Revised 10/30/2003:Currently (October 2003) you can buy a 2 GB PC Card hard disk (from Toshiba, Kingston or CMS) for around $75 and 5 GBs for under $150. An IBM 1 GB CF Microdrive costs less than $150 and a MagicStor 2.4 GB CF hard drive costs $199. A 1 GB CF memory card can be bought for less than $165, a new-to-market 2 GB CF memory card for under $375 and 4 GB for under $950. All of these prices are dropping rapidly. And if the recording software application streams the digital audio stream to a network (via a wired or wireless network interface), there are *no* media costs.

Coresound does some CF storage comparisons here: storage comparisons between CF and SD memory cards .

Now I have yet to think this through (I need to look into how CF memory cards connect to desktops without a slot and look into microphone connections, but this seems like a great solution (and a linux friendly solution as well). So the real choice is whether I want my recording device to double as an mp3 player or as a PDA. I’m leaning to the latter.

Update: Brian Dipert writes a two part article about the Core-Sound Alternative and why it is good: Part One and Part Two . Also, a Slashdot forum about pro-level hd portable recording.