[Mike Rivers]

wrote:
I know the flash recorder thing has been discused here and in other
production groups, but not this unit, and I think it might suit a need
but want to find out if anyone got one and hated it.

Googling turns up pretty much zip.

If you're talking about the Zoom, nobody has had a chance to hate it
because it hasn't shipped to anyone yet.

Zoom for $300 has now come up on the
radar and if she could use this for both field interviews (with
external mics) and as the recorder for the phone interviews (coming out
of a JK phone box) using line ins, it would be great.

I don't see any reason why it shouldn't do that OK. But you really need
to evaluate the user interface live and in person. Zoom makes some
decent sounding stuff but it never has enough buttons on it so there's
always a long route to some functions. Maybe they've caught on.

One cool thing about the Zoom, though you probably wouldn't have much
need for it, is that it apparently can stream audio out its USB port
right from the input, so you can record on an external hard drive.
That's important to me (if there's no internal drive) because I want to
be able to record many hours at a stretch without having to worry about
re-using the memory cards.

There was a lot of enthusiasm about the M-Audio Micro Track when it was
initially released, but I talked with several folks at the AES show
last weekend who said that the bloom is off the rose and it really
doesn't sound all that great and it's still buggy even after a few
firmware updates. But then not everybody runs into the bugs (depends on
what you have to do) and not everyone needs great fidelity. So it might
work out OK if you need to get something fairly promptly.