There's another 41 of them to go (weeks that is), everyone who sees it through whether they post something every week or not deserves a bit of a pat on the back, even if it's from yourself. This is a fairly gnarly challenge and I know I'm feeling the strain of producing something of quality each week (let's forget week 10...) while doing other things, doubly so I think because the other things I do most days is write music or read books on music. In any case, once the 52 weeks is up and anyone manages to output the full 52 pieces, then perhaps a few beers, wines, spirits or whatever your flavour and poison of choice might be, are in order, along with a hearty "fuck yeah!"

Congratulations to everyone who's made it thus far, Tuesday is just around the corner!

I'm not entirely sure on the semantics of Harvard referencing as I'm not (yet) versed in it.

The MR-2 does look very nice and the review I read was very favourable for no-noise recording. That looks like a potential winner, though is a bit more than I was hoping to spend. Maybe I'll try and find a bit of money from some kind of fundage...
Those books sound great too, I'll see if the library at Uni has copies!

May I ask who your hons. supervisor was?

Thanks Poppi, that's extremely helpful. I'll see what I can dig up with regard to those other branded devices.

I am unsure whether I would want to use an external microphone, at this stage I can't foresee the need, but that's foresight for you, you never can tell what's going to happen! As a standalone unit the H4n is probably good enough, but the external inputs I've found now to be fairly ordinary, though not unusable. For pure sound reproduction though, either a decent audio interface + laptop, or some other device would be preferable for external mic use I think.

b and c: I want a unit that is as versatile as possible, so, for example, to capture a very large, open space in as much detail as possible or to record an ensemble in a small space. Or anything in between. Big ask, I'm sure, but any unit that does one thing very well and the other tolerably would be more than adequate!

So far Sony are having a good run of recommendations, this is good. Marantz? Goodness, that can't have been cheap!

Are you aware of any books on field-recording mic technique? There's hundreds for instrument microphone technique books, but I've not seen one for field recording. Any recommendations?

Thanks again!

Awesome replies. Thanks everyone. The Sony M10 looks pretty nice, particularly its size. Interesting microphone array though. Hm, this has thrown a spanner into the works.

I've been pretty happy with the quality of the H4n, including through the XLR jack. And it's so much fun! Will look at the price of the Sony (449 according to the website, but I reckon I can do better!).

Re: being an oscillator king or whatever, hardly. I'm not doing any serious work with programming at the moment, and I think you're right about the "two different tools for different uses"; I didn't even realise max had no array functionality. It has a lot of things very similar, or that are used in ways you can use arrays in pd. But that's interesting. Anyway, because I have no projects with Max/PD, I'm just not really digging into it with any seriousness yet.

Thursdaybloon: thanks for that. The inbuilt help is fine and all, the thing I'm struggling with though, is for example, in pd [osc~] is a simple sine wave oscillator, and the equivalent seems to be [cycle~] in Max, but the usage is quite different. It's these little differences that are annoying. The other objects that I miss are things like [fiddle~] and [sigmund~], and while I understand that externals are just as prevalent in Max as PD, PD-extended has everything functional built in. So, for example, I could write a simple patch to pitch-track and resynthesize an incoming sound source at ~equivalent pitch in maybe 20 minutes, I can't even do it in Max yet 'cause the objects are so vastly different.

My piece was pretty sucky, and I've been too busy to listen to all but a few.