Tongfamily Website

Had a chance to record a concert with the Taxcam DR-1 highly recommended. It is quite a bit bigger than the iPod, but has really high quality builtin microphones. I was amazed at the quality. The user interface is primitive but it lets you record in real time in MP3 format and most importantly when you connect it via USB to your computer, it looks just like a hard drive, so you can copy off the MP3s of the concert.

To actually edit the MP3s and make it nice, I like to use on the PC MP3DirectCut by mpe3sch3.de1.cc because not only is it free, but it edits the MP3 directly. That is, it doesn’t translate it to another format and then reencode it. You aren’t going to have any loss if all you are doing is trimming things like I normally do.

On the Macintosh, the choices are more limited. GarageBand comes with Macs and works, but only seems to export in AAC format. There is also Audacity but it does have an intermediate format and then you reencode which means you have some losses and it is slow. The best choice seems to be a defunct package called Audion which is discontinued but is the only package I’ve found that edits directly in MP3. It is a PowerPC application and seems to hang sometimes on Leopard.

For payment, there is Fission which does cost a nominal $32, but also appears to be a direct editor. I have to say Fission is kind of amazing, a super tool. Let’s you split thing really easily and I love their interface that shows two timelines, one zoomed in and very nicely done. Also, the right click and then you can save a section as a different name is just about perfect. A great labor saver if you have to take a part a giant MP3. It is a direct editor so you don’t lose anything in editing and is much faster than transcoding between the editor and MP3. Tied with the high quality MP3 that the Tascam produces, I can get really high quality sound recording for the many kid concerts I seem to go to.