Voice recordings in MP3 format

I asked Technical support if there was a way to configure my 4GB Clip to do voice recordings in MP3 format instead of WAV.  They suggested that I use the Sansa Community to convey this request.

I record lots of speeches and would love to be able to use my Clip instead of a separate voice recorder.  If we could do voice recordings in an MP3 format as low as mono 11khz sample rate and 16kbs bit rate that would be awesome and meet my needs.

If others would like the ability to record in MP3 maybe the developers can put that in the next firmware.  Thanks for putting together an awesome device!

Until (if & when) that happens, you can record in .wav format & use Audacity (free audio-editing software) to convert it to .mp3 (smaller file size). This, obviously is a little more labor-intensive than just ‘press & record’ but it will do the job.

Why didn’t they just make it mp3 in the 1st place?

1)  MP3 encoding Licensing costs

2)  Power consumption.

Sansafix, is the license cost per player really that much (I don’t know)?  It just seems to me that recording into the universal MP3 format should be standard for a recording player at this point.  My humble thought. 

There are also other compressed wav formats… I don’t remember their names but they were available in the old Voice Recorder program; they achieve something like 1:5 compression that, combined with mono, 8-bit and 22,050 Kz sampling gives something like 0.5 Mb per minute. A Packard Bell MP3 player that I have uses that format… if you want I can go and check what is the exact name of the format as reported by the explorer.

Would it have to be licensed, too?

Edit: I think it is 11,025 Hz 4-bit ADPCM, giving ~44 kbps. More than enough for voice mono recordings.

Message Edited by porio on 09-28-2008 09:24 AM