First some things you shouldn’t do:

• Use Audacity for this - it seems to crash when asked to save long files as MP3s - at least on my machine.
• Rely on just one device to record anything important. Fortunately, I was also recording my interview on a minidisc which worked so I didn’t lose my data when Audacity crashed.
• Pay for shareware software - it just seems wrong to me that I should have to pay for an application just in order to save audio from my built-in microphone to my hard disk!

Luckily I found advice on Transom - a handy website designed to help would-be amateur and semi-pro radio programme producers to get started. The somewhat convoluted answer to my problem appeared to be to use Apple’s "Garageband" which comes with new Macs - as recommended by MacWorld. Even this stopped recording for some reason after an hour and 11 minutes of my latest interview but at least let me save the results.

Any idea why that might have happened or what I should use instead?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Research methods, Software reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.