Need some tech advice for recording childrens' voices... (high school, grade, teachers)

[syracusa]

For a long time I have been meaning to buy some kind of gadget to record my kids' voices: reciting a poetry, singing, talking, you name it...even for reading purposes. They are 2 and 5 and I am sure it would be nice to hear their small voices again, years down the road.

However, I have no idea what to use for such purposes. My parents used to have a cassette player and recorder. I am not even sure if such things are manufactured anymore...and I certainly don't know how to record them on CD-s.

I need some kind of easily portable, handy voice recorder that could also play the recording. My husband keeps saying that if I want to keep such recording for posterity, cassettes/voice recorders are a bad choice; but then he doesn't have a solution either.

What do parents/teachers use nowadays if they want to record kids' voices?

[tpk-nyc]

If you have Mac you can use Garageband. Then you can either burn a CD or make MP3s to email or put on a iPod.

Macs are great if you have kids. They're prefect for managing pictures, editing home movies (and burning DVDs), making recordings, publishing to a family Web site, etc.

[Henry Bowman]

GarageBand and a SnowBall USB Mic would work great.

You can also get an mp3 recorder like a Zoom and that would work well also

[Momma_bear]

You can get a small digital voice recorder, which you can put onto your computer and then burn to a CD. You can get one for around $40 at Best Buy.

[jtur88]

No matter what you use, the technology will become obsolete in a few years, and by the time they graduate from high school, there will be no machine in current use that will be able to retrieve the voice information. If you have a 20-year old cassette now with somebody's voice on it, the only way you can listen to it is in the dashboard of somebody's antique car, and even that will probably eat your cassette.

The medical community is struggling with a huge challenge of trying to figure out how to save medical records for decades into the future, and are already stymied by the fact that a huge body of stored medical data can now never be retrieved because it has degraded or there's almost no hardware remaining in use that can read it. And there is certainly none that can convert old data to new by any other method than analog. Which is the equivalent of you playing back your children's voices on an antique machine, and holding a microphone up near the speaker to re-record it with a state of the art device.