Buying a portable digital audio recorder
An hour before my husband was set to perform at a local charity event, I decided I wanted to up our recording game. Not a difficult task given that we usually just record on an iPhone. I dashed to Guitar Center to buy a portable audio recorder. I had my eye on one of The Zoom Handy Recorders, which obviously they didn’t have in stock despite the website saying otherwise. So I left with a frumpy little Tascam recorder sporting innovations like USB Micro-B and a maximum SD capacity of 32GB. The last one posed a problem since the only SD card I had was a 64GB card stolen from my Raspberry Pi.
It took a while to even figure out that the capacity was the problem since the device just showed variations on “Card Error”. But I eventually found this tome indicating that capacity was the main issue.
Formatting a 32 GB partition on a 64 GB card
I suspected the recorder might accept the card if it had a 32 GB partition, but I couldn’t figure out how to do accomplish this in the Disk Utility GUI on macOS. After an hour of fineagling with Claude I figured out how to do this in the terminal using fdisk and ultimately it worked perfectly, though not in time for the concert
- Find the disk identifier for the SD card (e.g., /dev/disk2)
diskutil list
- Unmount the disk (don’t eject)
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
- Launch fdisk
sudo fdisk /dev/disk2
- Create a new Master Boot Record
reinit
- Start auto-partitioning
auto dos
- Edit the partition
edit 1
For Partition ID, enter 7 (for exFAT).
When asked about CHS mode, answer n.
For partition offset, accept the default: 63.
For size, enter 67108864 (sectors for 32GB).
- Verify your changes
print
- Save changes and exit
write
exit
- Open the Disk Utility GUI. The card will now appear as 32 GB. Click Erase and format with MS-DOS (FAT32).
After following these steps the card was recognized by the TASCAM recorder.
The verdict
Alas I didn’t figure all this out in time for the performance, but we made some comparison recordings later that night.
iPhone 16 Pro
TASCAM DR-05X
And the verdicts? The two recordings are extremely similar. Scary similar. On pure audio quality they seem about evenly matched. The TASCAM has some nice extra features, though. It has stereo microphones aimed at a 90 deg angle, and you can record directly to a computer over USB. You can mount it directly to a standard 1/4-20 tripod mount, and obviously you don’t lose your phone while you’re using it.