Remembird Help Required (1 Viewer)

I bought a Remembird mainly for my other half getting some crossbill calls for me when she is out ( but also for myself when I can't be bothered lugging the Telinga on long surveys and just want to take my bins!).

The thing seems to work okay but most of the otherwise usable sound recordings are spoiled by a loud pulsating sound ( like it is wrting to disk ). This becomes even more evident when you take the exported MP3 and boost the gain in a program like MP3 direct. It is also evident on the sonograms unfortunately.

So, can ask any Remembird owners for a favour ? I will be contacting the manufacturer this week but want to make doubley sure mine is actually faulty and that this is not a normal effect ( incidentally the ones on the WRS website do NOT have this pulsing noise, and in fact inpsired confidence in buying one).

I need some test MP3's sent to me (PM me for my email) in order to compare with mine.

Select 320kps audio quality in Preferences
Switch pre Record to OFF in Preferences

(the Remembird must be attcahed via USB to your computer to do this.)

....and record a short burst (c.15 secs) of audio in a quiet environment. This is important as if mine is indeed faulty this should show it quite clearly. Export the file (with your name or initials on the file) from the Remembird programme as a standard MP3. Also, let me know if you use the built in memory or a MMC card eg. at 512mB.

There is a possibilty that the effect is caused by the fixed gain structure of the recorder ?

I am sure if it is a fault that the nice Remembird people will give us a new one, and I will keep everyone posted as to the outcome.

Thanks.

Lindsay

Hello Griffin, If you still need help, I can give a hand.
I know nothing about this kind of problem.
If still needed, send me your email by clicking on my name.

Gerd.

Oh, I do have one problem with one of my MMC cards which still holds a lot of recordings that are valuable to me (perhaps it even contains Snowy Owl) but I can't load it any more. Does that have to do with the contact points?

I did the engineering tests for the WSRS Remembird review and didn't find any pulsing sound of the type you described - in fact the remembird performed surprisingly well and much better than any other voice recorder I have come across.

I would guess your unit is faulty. I have seen in other SD card recorders a pulsing sound as data is written to the card so it is possible that different SD cards put a different load on the battery. Try a new battery, and also if recording without a SD card works (the Remembird has a small amount of on-board memory ISTR) or perhaps a different make of SD card?

Hi Lindsay,
Chris from RememBird here. One of our other users pointed me at this posting and I just wanted to check you were all sorted now? I think it was probably you that alerted us to a recent production problem but I think we've now replaced the affected units. Let me know if there's anything else we can do to help.

Regards
Chris

Hi Gerd,
If you want to send us your card we'll see if we can get the messages of it. We've found a few cards have really slow read times (and we're actually increasing the timeout on the next version of our software). We've got a new "Import" feature we're working on so if the recordings are there I can send you the database and you can then import them back into your own database.

Chris

cdblair said:

Hi Lindsay,
Chris from RememBird here. One of our other users pointed me at this posting and I just wanted to check you were all sorted now? I think it was probably you that alerted us to a recent production problem but I think we've now replaced the affected units. Let me know if there's anything else we can do to help.

Regards
Chris

Click to expand...

Hi Chris,

The replacement unit you sent was definitely a lot better. However, I still experience the anomaly, albeit not nearly so bad, when using my 1 gig and 512 gig MMCplus cards, especially on the highest setting of 320kbps. I suspect this is an issue with the cards I use, a Transcend MMC plus for the 1 gig and a Integral for the 512.

Can you recommend a brand that works well with the Remembird ?

I have posted a user review on my blog here:

http://pinemuncher.blogspot.com/

My wife loves the Remembird and takes it everywhere - she has even got me some cracking recordings of Scottish Crossbills with it !

Lindsay

Hi Lindsay,

The ones we supply are Kingston 512M ones. The bigger the capacity, the slower and hungrier they are for power generally. It's the burst of energy they need when actually writing the flash memory that can drag the power rail down a few millivolts and that can affect the microphone if they're hungry. So if using a big card and a high bit rate you're pushing it close to the limit. We've actually found some MMC cards that can't keep up at the 320kbps and normally run at 256 or lower.

If you need further help, we've now got support forums running on the remembird website btw. Even put a crossbill topic up in anticipation ;-) You might be interested in some of the new features coming out shortly.

Many thanks for the mentions on your blog. Glad you and/or your wife are enjoying it!