Our projects often require us to interview company executives and others for material to be used in all kinds of client publications – from corporate magazines through website articles and white papers to Annual Reports. I hope those of you who also need to record and transcribe will find the experience I describe here with some recording, processing and transcribing solutions useful.

I started out in the '90s using a Sony professional cassette recorder, but by around 2003 we'd switched to mini-disk recorders. They made it much easier to rewind, fast forward and mark interview recordings when transcribing, but still required going backwards and forwards between the recorder controls and the computer keyboard. The ultimate solution we wanted was a digital recording option that would allow us to control the playback of interviews hands-free on our Macs while transcribing them into a Word document.

At the end of 2006 we found the recording part of the solution we still use: Xtreme Mac’s MicroMemo (above), in combination with the the latest iPod at that time – the ‘generation 5.5' video iPod. They both still work fine together, but unfortunately Xtreme Mac discontinued the MicroMemo last year. A number of other options are still available however, including Belkin's 'TuneTalk' and upmarket 'GoStudio', and the very upmarket 'ProTrack' from Alesis. The 'Lloyd microphone adapter' from Incipio has good reviews, but can only be used with the iPod Nano 4G. At the moment, we would go for the 'Mikey' from Blue. This seems to be as good as or better than our MicroMemo, and is compatible with the iPod 5G, Classic, and Nano 2G, 3G and 4G models. UPDATE (December): We've now invested in a 'Mikey', and can confirm it works great with the Classic (as below), but it produced problems with my 5th generation iPod.

So that's the recording part sorted - now on to processing and transcribing. Occasionally when using the iPod with a recording accessory, we've found that the volume levels can be too low, especially when the mic is more than 50 cm away from the interviewee or speaker phone.

When this happens, however, we’ve found that the recordings are of high enough quality that we could use the free Audacity audio editing utility to bring them up to a suitable level without too much noise. Using the high quality mode requires roughly 10.3 MB per minute, so a 45-minute interview takes up about 460 MB, but that doesn’t pose a space problem with an 80 GB iPod, and our interviews can easily be archived on external hard disks or optical media. Another advantage of the higher capacity iPods has been that they operate longer before they need recharging. Given that the MicroMemo can only be used on battery power, this is particularly important.

What we needed to make our new interview and transcription system complete were two further items. The first was easy. Express Scribe transcription playback software can be downloaded for free from the good people at NCH Swift Sound in Australia. This great little application not only plays the recordings, but also allows you to vary the speed while maintaining pitch – very handy if you’re not a speed typist and your interviewee’s a motor mouth. Based on our use of Express Scribe, we can certainly also thoroughly recommend their dictation recorder applications. You can use system wide 'hot' keys to allow you to control playback while typing in Word, but that requires programming keys to pause, rewind and fast-forward that won’t affect Word or do anything else. It also requires other typing actions that divert your concentration from completing the transcription quickly and accurately. Hence the final item on our shopping list – some foot pedals to control Express Scribe and leave our hands free.

While grateful to NCH for producing the software we needed and at no charge, we thought that ordering the USB foot pedals we wanted from Canberra would be a bit silly, and we also didn’t want to wait the 10-25 days they estimated for them to get to Amsterdam. But after hours of googling, we still couldn’t find a European reseller. Believe it or not, we eventually ordered them from a firm in Hawaii called Executive Communication Systems.

At the equivalent of €47, their price was the lowest we'd found by far, and although the shipping and clearance cost the same again, they got it to Amsterdam within four days. Whoever the European distributors are, they’re keeping a really low profile, but in the meantime I can recommend the extremely efficient, friendly and helpful service of ECS in Honolulu. Now we’re enjoying much easier and faster transcription, so we’ve got exactly what we wanted, but if anyone can tell me where to buy these pedals in Europe, I’ll pass on the information here.

The product I’m putting in the spotlight today has been around in Germany for a while but gained additional international notoriety last week following the publication of an article and video by Nicholas Kulish on the New York Times’ website, that Tim Manners picked up on in his excellent ‘Cool News’ newsletter.

The ‘grillwalker’ is the brainchild of Berliner Bertram Rohloff. He thought up the idea back in 1997, having just lost his hotel management job. He’d wanted to open a food stand but, for reasons not revealed to or by Kulish, he couldn’t get the necessary permits. Apparently the required permits in Berlin only apply when the stand touches the ground, so Rohloff decided to exploit this legislative loophole by designing “a vendor's tray for the sale of fried sausages”.

After some heavier prototypes, he eventually developed a portable grill device that the ‘grillwalker’ wears like a tray in front of him, connected to a bottle of propane gas strapped in a frame on his back. The whole thing weighs in at around 15.5 kg. This is still pretty heavy, but operators usually work in teams of two, taking turns in carrying/selling and re-stocking.

Rohloff tells Kulish that he now has 15 employees selling sausages around Berlin, plus a number of subcontractors renting them in cities around the country. He’s also sold the equipment, at around € 5,000 a pop, to customers from Bulgaria through Colombia to South Africa. Every once a year we celebrate Christmas but right now I'm ran out of Christmas party ideas so I have decided to go with Popuppicnic.com.au to organize the party.