On the plus side it looks cool, is stereo (great for soundseeing tours) and the sound seems good to me (obviously sounds better with better encoding than the recording I did). But on the downside it’s hardly inconspicuous and the lack of windshield makes it almost useless if you want to use it while outside and there is the more than the slightest breeze.

I’m hardly qualified to recommend an alternative, so the best thing would be to recommend a site. The Podcast Rigs forum has lots of experienced podcasters who’d be happy to weigh in on a subject like this. Check it out here: http://podcastrigs.net/forum/

So, the moral of the story is: the iFP-8XX are great, especially for recording, but don’t even think of installing the UMS firmware (where the iFP is recognized by Windows as a USB disk drive)—this ruines recording capabilities completely. And, to answer my own question: The horrendous noises and low bitrates for recording ARE a 1.28 ‘feature’ indeed—stay clear!!!

I had one major problem—to get my folders in the right order (you can reorder files but not folders in iMM). I copied the entire folder structure (empty) onto the iriver first, basically all the folders for all the music I care to listen to. The reason is: Anything you add later gets appended at the end. I run a CMD script that creates an empty tree from my music library (mostly in iTunes). I drag the tree unto the iriver after a format, then I fill in the music I actually want to keep around. I leave about 255MB of the 1G free for recordings.

It’s there in all recording modes and at any encoding rate, it seems to be faster with higher bitrates (?).

Come to think of it, it wasn’t there before I upgraded to 1.28 UMS firmware. Oh my—that appears to be the price I’m paying for using UMS firmware…. but I really need to be able to work without this Music Manager.

Steve, what firmware are you using?

Those wind noises pale in comparison to a “cricket” chirping away all the time. Almost like a squeaking a cassette tape…

If you can point me to instructions on how to do it, maybe I can upload a sample. I am wondering whether my unit is just bad, or wether this is a 1.28 “feature”? Either way, it won’t really do for me.

I built my own set of binaurials that make the griffin mic sound like utter crud, I get extremely good stereo seperation and by adding a battery box I can record in extreme dynamic range situations like the 110db sond pressure level as found center-stage at a rock concert.

hiding the binaurials in a set of “croakies” on my glasses makes it 100% stealth, add’s a windsock and makes it completely impossible to record breath noise.

it took me about 3 days to build (you can buy them for around $125.00 pre-built) and about $7.00 in parts.

I really didn’t know whether the mic was sensitive enough to record birds singing at that distance, so I hung it out of a window early this morning. I made recordings at two different quality settings, and the higher quality seemed to pick out much more, although there was some sort of air-conditioner humming in the lower quality version, so it’s not exactly a scientific test. The birds would have been at least 20 feet away and most of them much further than that. You can listen for yourself…

At 64 kbits/sec:
http://reinventedsoftware.com/blog/wp-content/audio/birdsong64.mp3

At 128 kbits/sec:
http://reinventedsoftware.com/blog/wp-content/audio/birdsong128.mp3

Of course, the only other problem would be wind noise, since the mic doesn’t have a windshield, but some sort of furry cover would fix that.