Why not try digital kit?

The ubiquitous audiocassette is now 30 years old. It offers reliability, dubious quality and the information captured on it takes real effort to extract and to transmit. Yet there are now alternatives almost as reliable, of much higher quality, which can be shared globally in seconds.

There are three alternative storage technologies: one analogue (cassette tape) and two digital. Mini disk is becoming established as a recording technology. It has CD quality and offers up to 300 minutes per disk using compression.

By using auto marking a group can be broken into five-minute tracks automatically, so that brilliant quote in the midst of the discussion can be found relatively quickly. Each track, meanwhile, can be given a text label.

Its downside? Well, Sony is both an electronics company and a record company. They don't allow short cuts because of worries about piracy. So if you want to take anything off a minidisk player you have to play it back in real time ­ at the same speed as an audiocassette.

Enter mp3, a standard format for compressing audio files. This type of file sits on a computer, has a sound resolution almost as great as a minidisk or CD, and behaves exactly like a computer file. You can drag it, drop it, cut or paste bits out of it. Even email it as an attachment.

Its other major benefit is compression, being typically at least a tenth the size of its CD equivalent. A typical group discussion will barely fit on a conventional audio CD, yet an entire research project of 4-5 groups can be comfortably fitted onto a single CDROM in mp3 format.

Why have you never heard of this before? Because mp3s are marketed to teenagers who use them to download music from the Internet onto computers and then onto mp3 players. But there's nothing to stop you working the opposite way recording your interviews onto an mp3 recorder and moving the files from there onto your computer.

My now veteran mp3 recorder stores 33 hours of audio and stores it as a file. Newer versions hold over 100, so I can carry my last six months of research groups around in my pocket. When I plug it into my PC it sees the recorder as an external hard drive. I can drag files to and from the file manager. A 90-minute group takes around 90 megabytes of space and just two minutes to upload. Which you can't do with cassette tape or minidisk.

When I load the file into an audio editor (there are lots of free ones available) I can increase the sound levels, remove unwanted noise from the entire recording and cut out coughs and hesitations at will. And I can then go on to cut and paste edited quotations straight into Powerpoint.