First look: M-Audio MicroTrack II mobile audio recorder

To make our podcasting a bit more flexible we bought an M-Audio MicroTrack II today. It’ll give us high-quality audio almost anywhere we go and with two microphones. There are simpler (and cheaper) ways we could record but with the MicroTrack we can plug in two microphones and record each as a channel in a stereo recording. So one mic is the left channel and the other the right channel. In effect, we then have separate recordings of each voice, which gives us more options when editing. The MicroTrack II is about the size of an iPod classic and it takes a Compact Flash card to record to. You can connect it via USB cable to your Mac and the recorded audio files (WAV or MP3) can then be dragged across to the Mac for editing. On the MicroTrack you find a few controls of which the most important ones are the two gain controls for the left and right channels. They can be adjusted while record to balance the recording between a very soft and a very loud source, for example.

Now I need to sort out the microphones and hope to have that organized tomorrow. If all goes well you’ll hear examples of the recording quality already this Thursday.