I have a dearly loved 4th Generation iPod (20GB) with a Griffin iTalk voice recorder. It works great. The sound quality isn't CD-level, but I can set it on a podium and record a speech, and the final recording sounds pleasant to the ears.

But, iPods don't last forever, and Audrey II finally died. A new hard drive would probably resurrect it, but I was looking for an excuse to get a new video iPod anyway.

So if you've been listening to the show, you know the saga of Audrey ]|[.1. I'm still having audio problems with it, but I've figured out the problem, and it's something I need to fix in my iTunes library. I'll post about that another day.

Needing a voice recorder, I have tried several for the iPod 5G. Having read that they can do CD-quality sound excited me, especially since some can also marginally do stereo, but now that I've tried almost every one, including the iTalk Pro, successor to my old faithful, I've learned that the 5th generation iPods just don't record audio well, or at least mine doesn't.

The fist model I got was a MacAlly iVoice voice recorder. Normally, I read a lot of reviews before buying anything with a chip in it, but it was new, so I could find no reviews, and since the price was right. I jumped on it. What a disappointment. Unless you hold it right up to your mouth, you can't hear a thing. It's fine for doing voice memos to yourself, but moving it more than a foot or so from your mouth makes it sound like it was in the next room when recording.

That's when I picked up an iTalk Pro, which got the best reviews of the batch without spending more than I wanted to. The audio quality is great, but every few minutes, it would just cut out a few seconds, like a sentence or so, skipping like an old vinyl record. Being worthless for that reason, I returned it. On reading even more reviews, I found that all of the recorders are prone to this skipping. This causes me to believe that the problem lies not in the recorders, which are basically just a sound chip and a mic, but with the iPod itself.

I'm not an engineer, so I can't say for sure, but it seems that the 5th Gen iPods have no cache, or rather can't use it when writing to the hard disk. It records a certain amount of voice data to the RAM in the iPod, then writes that chunk to the disk, but while it's writing that chunk to the disk, it's unable to start refilling the cache with more data. So either the cache needs to be a bit more flexible, or someone, either the mic manufacturers or Apple, needs to add another cache chip somewhere so the two can take turns.

So I'm back to the drawing board for a portable recording device, and I've settled on a used iRiver iFP 7xx series or 8xx series, thanks to a recommendation from dpeach at the Podcast Pickle forum. It uses flash memory, so I expect that it shouldn't have these problems, plus many podcasters swear by them as recorders.

Given that a used iRiver is cheaper than a new iPod recorder, this seems like an excellent solution, so I'm excited to find one and try it out. If you have one, let me know what you think, or what solutions you've tried.

And for the family angle, consider keeping these handy to record your kids when they say or do something amusing. Years from now, you'll be glad you did.