mic recording on mp3 device is quiet

toasterman

Hi guys,
I've got a portable mp3 player which has a line-in socket.
I've also got an old minidisc player with a line-in socket.

I'd like to be able to use one or other for recording from a microphone, but as it has no mic input, it is far too quiet to be usable.
I found this out today after buying a microphone with a battery in it (I assumed this would boost it enough to be hearable..I'm no sound engineer).

Someone suggested to me to buy a portable microphone pre-amp, but so far the cheapest I can find one of these ifor s £100 - which seems a little bit steep.
According to some reviews, a lot of Sony's old minidisc players had microphone sockets and built in pre-amps. I'm not too keen to go down this road though, as the format is pretty obsolete, and I know that aside from the new himd models - you can't copy things you've recorded from the minidisc, back to a computer - except doing it in real time with an audio cable.

I do other recordings at the moment through a mixer, to the line-in socket on my mp3 player - which works fine. I take it home, plug it in, it appears as a drive, and I can copy it back to my home pc.

But I'd quite like to leave the studio and try interviewing some people, so I need to find a way of recording that is portable and battery powered.

Any idea what sort of thing I can buy? Is there a cheap way of boosting the microphone level? I don't really have much to spend on this - maybe £20 or £30 if possible.

Thanks in advance for any help

thefirs

You could acquire a mic-capable minidisc recorder from ebay (eg: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sony-Walkman-MZ-R70-Personal-MiniDisc-Player-Recorder_W0QQitemZ320101702232QQihZ011QQcategoryZ15056QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) - they seem to go for a song these days. Use this as your preamp, feeding the line-out from the MD to the MP3 player line-in.

toasterman

Cheers for that thefirs!

I nipped down to Cash Converters and got myself a £29 minidisc player complete with optical cable, batteries, a headphone remote, and a case.
Doesn't seem to work that great feeding back out to my mp3 recorder..it does wind up a bit quiet...but at least I can still record interviews and whatnot.
It does the job basically.