The Right Toot for the Job

Rick Sammon’s blog today about photographing thousands of snow geese blasting off reminded me of an e-mail I got a while back from a world-champion duck caller. Jim James of Carlson Championship Calls wrote,

I make and sell waterfowl calls. In the past, I often would produce a short, personalized audio tape for customers when they asked, or when they purchased some of my better calls. I advise them about calling and demonstrate their call for them. These are very informal tapes and done sort of as a favor. As you can imagine, the use of audio tapes has seen its day! I used my last one about a week ago and don’t think it would be wise to order another case of blank tapes since we are now so entrenched in the digital age.

I’d like to be able to get a digital recorder that I could use to record these short “tapes” and then in one swift motion dump it onto a CD (that would play in a standard vehicle or home CD player) so I could send it along with their call. I have tried using a MP3 recorder but the time involved to download and convert the file and then burn it to a CD is way more than I want to invest in these short complementary “tapes.”

Is there anything out there that would allow for me to turn on the recorder, record a short file, and then dump and burn to a CD?

I suggested that the easiest approach for him could be a standalone CD recorder such as the Roland CD-2e ($650). But I also noted that burning MP3 recordings to CD shouldn’t take too much time with the right software, because most CD-burning programs handle MP3 conversion in the background. You can also speed up the transfer of files from recorder to computer dramatically by using a USB 2.0 “hi-speed” card reader. (Many MP3 recorders use the much slower USB 2.0 “full speed” format.)

So I asked Jim what system he had been using. He replied,

The iRiver [recorder] I use records in a format that needs to be converted to MP3 first upon downloading the file to my computer. Download time is not really a problem because these are short files. Then I open the MP3 file in Audacity, cut and paste to take it from mono to stereo...and then export as a .wav file. From there I burn it to the CD using [a very old program from] Roxio — which sometimes fails and I end up using a shareware program I found on the WWW.

Like I said, these are supposed to be just quick informal “tapes,” but what I do now makes me not want to do the little added service. Before, it was so simple to just pop a tape in the recorder on the shop bench, hit Record, make a 15–20 minute personalized tape, rewind, throw it in the box with the call, and ship it off.

Jim’s point about workflow is excellent. Digital tools aren’t always faster, and yet he’d come to a point where the analog way wasn’t working either. In checking out his site today, I noticed he now offers both streaming MP3 examples of his bird calls and paid digital downloads. I imagine for many of his customers, though, getting a CD in the mail would be the ideal way to learn about the art of attracting birds with sound.

For more on digital audio recorders, see our forum.