Best mp3 recorder – mAudio Microtrack.

December 12, 2008 By 2 Comments

mAudio’s Microtrack has proved to be the best mp3 recorder for sound, money and longevity

. click to listen

This week, I took our trusty old mAudio Microtrack I to record a Christmas Carol concert at St. Luke’s church in London. There was no fancy set up – just the natural ambient sound and the Microtrack with it’s little plug-in mic.

I recorded this in mp3 format, 44.1Khz at 192 bits. Since then, it’s been edited and recompressed as an mp3 and uploaded.

The machine is over two years old now and still giving great service. Occasionally it locks on saving a file but so far never loses the file it was saving. The battery was never great – so I velcro a 4xAA usb battery pack onto it. That gives me as much battery as I want to match the 33 hours of top quality mp3 recording.

It’s been a seriously good unit. It’s done seminars, conferences, outside broadcasts, podcasts, video soundtracks, panel discussions… you name it. So good, in fact, that I’ve not even been able to find a reason to buy the next generation Microtrack.

Filed Under: review, WOW! Tagged With: , , , ,

Online reputation monitoring software first impressions: BrandsEye

November 27, 2008 By 3 Comments

Can BrandsEye help real-world businesses make sense of online reputation monitoring?

I’m not sure yet – because I’ve only just started trying out the basic version of it.

What I can tell you, though, is that there’s a fighting chance it will. What makes me say that? This: when I gave BrandsEye feedback their software wasn’t intuitive to use, they were bothered enough to get in touch to find out more – within hours.

That resulted in a 40 minute call from BrandsEye’s Tim Sheir in South Africa to find out what didn’t work for me and why – and to give me a guided tour.

This year, I’ve tried out 3 online reputation management software packages including BrandsEye. All 3 suffer from being designed by people who can’t quite get their head around the fact that people on the outside of their product don’t know what they know about it. ;-)

This result for me is disorientation. Don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Don’t know what I can do. And I’m heading out the door saying ‘forget it, I’ll just stick with Google Alerts’.

BrandsEye is the first of the three to take that experience seriously.

Watch this space for a fuller report on BrandsEye when I’ve had time to learn more about it.  Meantime, here’s the neat little ‘monitor widget‘ doing it’s thing…. all for $1 US per month.

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Lupe Velez drowned in her own toilet bowl?! Thanks, Cheeta

November 7, 2008 By 1 Comment

Without you I’d never have known who Lupe Velez was – let alone how she met her unsanitory end!

Me CheetaIf, like me, you grew up sometime in the 60s, you’ll be imprinted with the Johnny Weissmuller ‘Tarzan’ films of the late 30s and early 40s.

I remember them playing on TV again in the late 70s and then they just seemed to disappear. Umgawa.

None of us knew what happened to Tarzan, Jane or Cheeta. Even fewer of us cared what happened to that arrogant little shit, Boy.

“Me, Cheeta” changes all that.

Written by the only surviving member of Tarzan’s family this book will have you simultaneously longing for an era you never grew up in, pining for black and white people you never met and wishing you could fly out and meet the chimp himself before he goes to the great escarpment in the sky and there’s no-one left to tell the tale any more.

This book didn’t so much jump off the display at me as perform a backflip while smoking three Luckys and knocking back a cocktail or two.

I had to buy it. I advise you to do the same – it’s great. Ah, the old days….

Filed Under: review Tagged With: , , ,
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