436-Recording Capability

[Star56]

Folks,

Thinking of picking up a 436 for the DRM.

Question about its recording process. I had a HP-1 and hated the recording on that unit. You could not playback all your recordings in one sitting seamlessly without restarting the new file every few seconds.
The GRE 800 allowed you to sit back and listen to all your recording files in one seamless stream.

How does the 436 record audio? Can you replay all the recordings as once or do you have to restart a new file after every few recordings like the HP-1?

Thanks!

Tom

 

[KCoax]

It is same as HP-1, 100 file .wav segments. You can transfer the .wav files to a pc and use a media player (e.g. Media Monkey) to organize by group/freq assignment. I use TAudioConverter to put them in .mp3. I agree, 100 files per session is rather annoying.

 

[Star56]

It is same as HP-1, 100 file .wav segments. You can transfer the .wav files to a pc and use a media player (e.g. Media Monkey) to organize by group/freq assignment. I use TAudioConverter to put them in .mp3. I agree, 100 files per session is rather annoying.

Ah! Thanks for the info. What a strange system they use for recording!

Tom

 

[kruser]

Ah! Thanks for the info. What a strange system they use for recording!

Tom

Yes it is. And if you have a ton of recordings, you don't want to move them off the card to your computer with the card in the radio. That is painfully slow!

If you have a USB 3.0 port on your computer, get a USB 3.0 card reader and use that. Even if your computer does not have a 3.0 port, using a card reader is still way faster to get the audio files off the card and moved over to your computer.

Like KCoax said, move the files to your computer and then use a compatible media player and you can listen to all in one setting. Even if they are nested in several folders, most decent media players will keep on chugging along as long as you started at the root folder where you put your audio files.
You can actually play them with a 3rd party media player directly from the card in the scanner but I usually move them off for archiving purposes.
Several media players will display the metadata that is stored with each recording also, like the UID and any tone or NAC info. And of course the time and date and frequency and TG names etc.
I have 10's of thousands of recordings and I bet I've never listened to 3% of them!
One good thing is it does remove silence so playback can be faster than if you were listening live.
I could have that wrong and the Uniden may record the silence so I may be thinking of a GRE PSR800.

 

[Star56]

Yes it is. And if you have a ton of recordings, you don't want to move them off the card to your computer with the card in the radio. That is painfully slow!

If you have a USB 3.0 port on your computer, get a USB 3.0 card reader and use that. Even if your computer does not have a 3.0 port, using a card reader is still way faster to get the audio files off the card and moved over to your computer.

Like KCoax said, move the files to your computer and then use a compatible media player and you can listen to all in one setting. Even if they are nested in several folders, most decent media players will keep on chugging along as long as you started at the root folder where you put your audio files.
You can actually play them with a 3rd party media player directly from the card in the scanner but I usually move them off for archiving purposes.
Several media players will display the metadata that is stored with each recording also, like the UID and any tone or NAC info. And of course the time and date and frequency and TG names etc.
I have 10's of thousands of recordings and I bet I've never listened to 3% of them!
One good thing is it does remove silence so playback can be faster than if you were listening live.
I could have that wrong and the Uniden may record the silence so I may be thinking of a GRE PSR800.

Thanks Guys! Yeah with my HP-1 I moved them to a PC and reorganized my folders and such. I just find the 800 method to be so easy. I can listen to 600 calls in a 45 minutes period ( no silent periods recorded)

 

[kmacinct]

Anyone have a rough estimate about the amount of time you can record / store - Example recording fireground communications at a fairly active scene?

 

[troymail]

For most people - alot.

Best I can tell, it's not about the length of the recordings but more about the number of files.

I typically see about 28-30 thousand files over days and days - which is usually about 2+ Gb of recordings... then the radio starts rebooting itself and the keys become sluggish.

It really depends on how active the talkgroups/channels are that you have programmed/enabled.

So, if you have a 4Gb card, chances are that will meet basic recording needs.

 

[ofd8001]

Looking over some recordings I made during a trip last summer:

There is a 100 file per folder situation. Each transmission (from time the scanner "picks up" the audio until the channel is released) is a file. Every 100 recordings creates a new folder. The scanner will create new folders until the SD card is full.

A one minute long recording took up about 1 MB of memory. So you can do the math on the size of the SD card you use.

 

[SCPD]

This is the one major item where I will keep my Whistler scanners .. Uniden has so dropped the ball on the audio recording it is laughable.

 

[racingfan360]

Several media players will display the metadata that is stored with each recording also, like the UID and any tone or NAC info. And of course the time and date and frequency and TG names etc.

Can anyone advise on which media players will display ALL of the recorded metadata associated with a DMR recording please? I only seem to have come across those that display a partial amount of info in comparison to what is shown in playback ofbthe same file on the BCDx#6HP itself.