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106 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
106 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4121
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Title: HPR4121: RODE wireless microphones
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4121/hpr4121.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:51:55
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---
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This is hacker public radio episode 4,121 from Monday the 20th of May 2024.
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Today's show is entitled Road Wireless Microphones.
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It is hosted by Clinton Roy and is about nine minutes long.
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It carries a clean flag.
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The summary is, my first recording on newer microphone.
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All right, well, good evening hackers.
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My name is Clinton and this is a very off the cuff episode from me just to announce that
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I've got a new microphone.
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So I just wanted to run through a couple of details of that, make a show, say a little
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about the microphone, why I got it, what I had to do with it.
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So this is a roady wireless go to setup.
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It comes with three little boxes, roughly, roughly you could fit each one of the little boxes
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inside a matchbox.
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So there are three of these that come with the set that I bought, two of the microphones
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that you clip onto your lapel, the third is a transceiver.
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So at the moment I've got the transceiver on and I've got one of the microphones on.
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I bought this because I'm going to be going to a conference soon and one of the things
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that I do try to do at conferences is do interviews with people.
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And this is kind of nice in that I can switch these two microphones on, give one to myself,
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give one to the person I'm interviewing and I don't have to use a single microphone
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and shove it underneath their faces and I don't have to swap the microphone between
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the two of us.
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The other feature, like the particular reason I've got this model is that each of the two
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microphone units actually has built in RAM.
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So it will actually record, like if you've got it set up in the mode, which I do, you
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can get each microphone to do a backup recording of your presentation.
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The regular mode for this set of microphones is to actually treat the transceiver as
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a source and plug it into your computer or plug it into your camera as an external microphone.
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But it has this lovely mode, which I'm recording this particular episode too.
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We can just turn it on, the transceiver is not plugged into a computer, it's not plugged
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into anything and it'll record something like 40 hours of voice and later on I can hook
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it up to my computer and as a standard mass storage device and just download the waveform
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I believe.
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So it does have some Windows firmware or Mac firmware.
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I didn't have too much fun getting that to work under Linux.
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I tried under a couple of different VM products and wasn't having any luck, so I tried
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under wine, I tried under open box, eventually I did end up installing like a full Windows
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10 install onto a QMU image and that had enough stuff working, such that I could install
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the Rody firmware on it.
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That let me do an upgrade of the firmware on the two microphones and the transceiver because
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the first thing you do when you buy something these days is out of the box you have to upgrade
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the firmware because why would they do that at the factory before they send it out when
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they can just make the users do that?
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And there is a phone app but it does not let you update the firmware on these particular
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hardware models.
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If I remember the error message correctly, it does look like the Android app lets you
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update the firmware on other Rody microphone devices but not this particular model.
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So I had to go down the track of setting up a QMU.
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I did find a good blog post on how to set up a Windows box on QMU.
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It had a few things that seemed outdated so maybe it's a job for me to write an updated
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blog post on how to do this, if for nothing else instructions on how to do this in future
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when I need to rerun the firmware update.
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The other thing that I really needed to use the software for though is to switch on the
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recording option.
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So out of the box these things do not record to the memory that's built into the
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microphones.
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So I had to get, I had to update the firmware and then I had to run the software on both
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of the microphones to switch on the recording option.
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But now that that switched on I can just hook it up as a USB mass device as I've mentioned
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before and presumably I can just copy the files and delete the files and I won't actually
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have to run that software.
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So there's a number of options going forward so I can write that blog post with the updated
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details, there were a number of hoops that I found that I did not have to go through
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of the blog post I found so things are getting easier over time.
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Depending on how in depth I want to go I could potentially one day sit down and install
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like a USB listening device and see if I can work out how to work out if there are
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any magic packets getting sent to do the configuration on the device.
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Like do I need to break any sort of crypto stuff or is it just a straight command like
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plugging the device and send a command with a few funky options.
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So maybe in the very distant future when I've got no other things on I could try and
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work out a pure USB non-windows solution for setting some of these configuration options.
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I'm not sure I'd go down the track of updating the firmware I think that's probably a little
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bit too risky but you know maybe one day in the future but yeah basically this set of
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microphones assuming that it works out okay assuming that it sounds good I'll hopefully
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be using these for conferences coming up hopefully as well I'll be able to use it for
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camping and stuff like that so if I'm out and about I'll just be able to pull out these
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two things, transfer, microphone, a couple of clicks, turn them on, they talk to each
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other wirelessly and then start recording something.
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So it's much smaller than the current microphone that I'm using so it's much easier to travel
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with.
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There are two of them so that when I'm interviewing someone it's much easier and it's
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got recording memory so I don't actually have to plug them into a computer so all up
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it should be much easier to use I think it might even give better recording outputs
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and hopefully like increase the number of talks and presentations that I give on HBR.
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So that's been Clinton this has been a very off the cuff recording I very much amused
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to sitting down and writing out a full script for these things so I'm doing this because
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you know it's cool new hardware but you know also because HBR needs more episodes.
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So yeah maybe other people can do an episode on what particular funky wireless or what
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particular microphone setup that they've got that they enjoy using and what the advantages
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are and disadvantages are.
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That's it for now, ciao.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio, does it work?
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Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out
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Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive
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and our Sync.net.
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On this otherwise stated today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
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