The modern digital audio recorder is a thing of wonder. I have a Zoom F3 that is tiny and that records such an insanely wide dynamic range that it doesn’t even have a “Volume” setting. All fixed in post. And yet ... Every so often it completely fails to work as expected. Most likely it is my expectations that are wrong, but that’s no excuse.
In the olden days, you see, when my expectations were laid down, and tape recorders recorded onto tape, the good ones had a special playback head that came after the recording head. (Cheapo ones had a single head that was used to record and to play back.) This meant that if you were monitoring the recording on headphones, as you should be, always, you would hear the signal from the playback head. If anything were wrong with your equipment or settings, you wouldn’t hear anything. Admittedly, you were always listening a fraction of a second behind the action (cue many old jokes about sound recordists) but at least you knew that the recorder was indeed capturing the action.
Not so today. It is entirely possible to conduct a long interview, monitoring all the while through your headphones, without capturing a single peep. Ask me how I know.
It happened again yesterday, to my shame. As usual, it was after getting flustered, this time because I had failed to check my batteries in advance and had to fix that after only a few minutes. Shut down, of course, is easy to detect because whatever you were hearing in the headphones vanishes. With a fresh set of batteries, monitoring was restored, the pretty digital soundwave display did its undulating thing, and off we went again. Except that I failed to put the thing back into record mode.
My fault, I know, but how hard would it be, honestly, for manufacturers to build in a beep every 15 seconds or whatever to indicate that while you may be monitoring just fine, you aren’t actually recording anything? Please. Or is there some wetware hack I could implement to make certain I never, ever, make that mistake in future?
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