I was fooling around with my HTC Android phone yesterday and discovered something that has a definite use for radio remotes. An Application called Hertz will record .wav files, which can then be transferred via e-mail or ftp to the studio and played back on the air. The program is pretty slick, it allows sample rates from 8 to 44.1 kHz.
I made a sample recording, the microphone in the HTC phone is okay, a better microphone would sound better. After it was done, I emailed it to myself and listened on the laptop. The email took about 4 minutes for 20 seconds of a 32 kHz .wav file. One could cut that down by choosing a lower sample rate. I have found that 32 kHz is the minimal acceptable sample rate for analog FM. Anything lower than that sounds choppy.
In another potential use, a news reporter could use this to record audio to save and transfer to a computer using a USB cable. The recording time limit depends on the size of the SIM card and the sample rate. Additionally, my HTC Android phone will detect and use WiFi networks, where available, for data services. Using a WiFi network will avoid those 3G data charges and also increase download/upload speeds.
My Verizon plan has unlimited data transfer, so it really doesn’t matter what sample rate I use, your mileage may vary.
Couple the Hertz app with the VNC app mentioned previously, and a person could do all sorts of things remotely with a radio station. The Hertz app is available for free download from the Android app store.
Now, if it would do mp3 directly, that would be even better.
Of course, anything that creates mp3 files has to be licensed to Fraunhofer IIS, so it would no longer be free software
There is much freeware that converts to mp3, and I wouldn’t think it would be a big deal at this state of the art. And if a license was required I would think it would be a piddle, especially with the popularity and excellent quality of this compressed format.