Belkin Makes iPod Into Recording Studio January 7, 2007
Read more Digital Audio
This is a bit of a head-scratcher, but Belkin has gone to the trouble of building a mixing board that records music onto Gen 5 iPods (those that support video). The TuneStudio is the first four-channel mixer for iPods, claims Belkin (and we're inclined to believe it, since the idea never even occurred to us). It supports 16-bit, 44-kHz audio, and each channel has a three-band equalizer.
Why you'd want to record your next indie music hit onto an easily losable, low-fi handheld with a fragile hard drive instead of onto a nice Mac or PC computer is a mystery. And if you do, make sure your iTunes is set for manual synching, or else it will erase your precious creations whenever you dock the iPod.
Anyway, it's a swank-looking device, judging by Belkin's artist rendering. The TuneStudio goes on sale this summer, for $180. – Sean Captain
Editor | Martin Lynch
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Comments
The Beatles/ George Martin/ started on 4-track/ blah blah......so what, Habitat cant put a better looking trinket on my sideboard!
I'm thinking portable Podcasting studio with much more control over the recording and no need to ditch my existing mikes...
Why do this instead of using a Mac or PC? Umm .. price, portability, stability. The iPod is a very stable machine - 4-track recording to this device is a very appealing option for many musicians, who don't want to boot up a PC/Mac, don't want to maintain arcane plugin dirs, don't want to have to shell out thousands for DAW software packages, don't want to be able to do e-mail in the middle of a recording session, etc.
If this mixer allows me to mix down to two-channel files that can be heard on the iPod directly (after a session, just take the iPod out to listen to the mix), then its a winner in my studio .. I'll get it, and I've already got all of the above-mentioned DAW crap at my disposal .. a $180 option to turn my iPod into an attractive and functional mix-down station is very, very nice indeed .. I hope we see more iPod-related music tools out there in the future (a sampler, anyone?)
$180 is not that expensive for a 4-channel mixer, if it's an ok mixer at minimum that is. but if portability is an issue why not use a small 4 channel mixer w/ an external firewire 400/800 harddrive instead? it's faster, cheaper and has a higher capacity than an ipod. if belkin is smart they make sure you can hook-up a fw drive as well.