Audio Test: Zoom H1 vs Blue Snowflake vs Canon ELPH 300HS

With my recent purchase of the Zoom H1, I was personally curious as to how it stacked up compared to my old microphone, the Blue Snowflake. While doing the audio test, I figured it would be helpful to you 300HS owners to compare that internal microphone as well. What do you think?



Obviously, the Zoom H1 wins this microphone showdown with the Blue Snowflake coming in at second place. The Canon Powershot ELPH 300HS dose have surprisingly good audio quality for the price of the camera, however. With a little audio editing in iMovie, GarageBand or Final Cut, you could get some surprising results from that tiny little camera!

Unboxing: Zoom H1 Handy Recorder Microphone

The Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS has taken the tech community on YouTube by storm in the past few weeks with many major video makers buying the camera. But before there was the 300 HS, there was the Zoom H1 by Samson. I must admit that I have now jumped on the bandwagon in an attempt to try out this sub $100 microphone. The low price will be quite attractive for many and still deliver professional audio quality to any camera setup. Watch as I unbox the Zoom H1 and give a quick rundown of why I picked up this guy.



If you have any specific questions regarding this microphone or my camera setup in general, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Review: Blue Snowball Microphone

In today's post I'm doing a quick review of the Blue Snowball Microphone. It's priced at $99 but if you'd like a cheaper way to go, go with Amazon. The Blue Snowball Microphone has a very unique form factor; a ball. It's actually pretty cool looking to me. It's also got a mount that helps keep it stable while use. The stand has three adjustable legs to create easy and hassle free transportation. Overall I'm very satisfied with my microphone. You can use it for podcasting, video blogging, music creation and more! Personally, I use it for my YouTube videos and my live webcasts on uStream.TV. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to take a look at my post. 

If you'd like to see more content check out my YouTube channel: ace4vikings

iSaidWhat?! Review

Over the holidays, I stumbled across a very useful app for audiophiles, students and pranksters. iSaidWhat?! is an audio recorder, editor and mixer which can be used to record lectures or mix together recordings to create the illusion that someone said something they didn’t.

The first thing I noticed about the app was the icon. The icon was very clean and stood out from the rest of the pack. I immediately had high expectations of this app and I was not disappointed. I proceeded to open the app’s iTunes page and the next thing that struck me was the clean layout of the app. I knew exactly how to navigate around easily when I installed it. A nifty feature of this app is the input percentage meter, which allows you to choose how much the app can pick up. Although, this was not very intuitive. It should be there by default, rather than having to click the small grey microphone icon, which does not give a good indicator of its function. However, the feature is a bonus and not a necessity.

The next thing that caught my eye was the script feature, which puts a script for you to read from, which could be useful for song writers for example.

Now onto the main function of the app, which is the editor and mixer. I think it performs this function very well and it is very easy to use. It has two tabs, one for the recordings and one for arrangements of recording snippets. It’s very easy to cut bits out after a recording and easy to use it in arrangements.

Unlike some App Store reviewers, I disagree that the name is bad. I think it’s a unique name and will catch student’s eyes along with its icon that makes good use of the small square area. It could be improved to appeal to the songwriters though.

Complaints

The only complaints I have about this app are very minor. The first is that I should be able to delete a recording without deleting an arrangement that uses snippets from it.



The second is that the app should open to your list of recordings rather than the “New Recording” screen except on first launch. That’s it! Like, I said, these are not big deals and can be very easily fixed.

To sum up, I would recommend this app to pranksters, students and songwriters. For example, a student could use the arrangements feature to make one arrangement for a topic that was discussed in several lessons. This could be useful for many other purposes and I think at 99 cents, it’s a steal.

Update:
“The app opens in the recording screen on launch only if you didn’t close from within the snippets view, or arrangement view.”- my mistake
Also, as I suspected the developer says that “Arrangements aren’t seperate files, they actually read from the recording. Snippets are just shortcuts to a recording in order to conserve space and time.”

MINT SPEAKERS

Mint Speakers are an ipod music banging sound system, which takes up less space on your desk, and are very inexpensive. I was given this tiny box shaped speaker for christmas and was surprised to find out that it came with a wireless adapter that you could connect to a desktop or laptop( no need for drivers or what not) just plug and play. Cool, but i had these logitech speakers just hanging around on my desk{ great sound, but I was getting sick of the wires hanging from the top} I took down the big logitech speakers and hooked up the mint wireless speakers and the sound was pretty good.  Good to past on for a ipod speaker system and included a line in outlet to the T.V { which sounds great if your watching a movie and your tv is next to your speaker} Overall mint speakers are really cool and a great buy to getting a clean desk. 

Check it out search google {mint speakers}