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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Unbelievably Horrible Product!

Written by SD from Potomac

Nov 26, 2006

I bought this product from the local Apple Store but unfortunately I did not use it within the 14 days. So now I cannot return it to Apple. The product has all the problems listed in other reviews: heavy battery consumption, hissing sound of the drive etc. But what I experienced was even more serious. After I used this device on my 60GB iPod only once, my iPod started to freeze. My iTunes library started to malfunction. A second iPod that is linked to the same library started to freeze too. I could not update both these iPods. So I had to do the unthinkable. Both iPods were brought to the original factory setting. Voice Memos recorded with TuneTalk had to be removed from the library. I have never used the product again and both my iPods are working great once again. This product has a serious software issue and unless that is fixed it should not be sold.

64 of 84 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Skipping renders it useless

Written by ML from Toronto

Oct 16, 2007

I have the skipping problem on my 5G iPod, which completely renders anything it records completely useless since half of what it records ends up gone. After much nonsense trying to get someone from Belkin to help me, I actually went to the Toronto Eaton Centre Apple Store, where salesperson Ian actually got in touch with Belkin over a series of days and follow-ups (absolutely amazing service) and got them to send me a new one.

So, I got the new one, and, of course, exact same problem. Though this issue is widespread, there is no technical note about it on the Belkin website, though now telephone service acknowledges that there's nothing I can do but replace the product AGAIN with one that allegedly works (heard that last time). To add insult to injury, I have to pay for the cost of shipping it internationally to Belkin, plus any customs and courier broker fees! Whaa?

So...now I'm afraid to use any replacement because I can't afford to lose any audio, and they promise the new one will work. If it wasn't for this, I would rave about the product because the sound quality truly is fantastic. Unfortunately, this process has turned me completely off Belkin.

60 of 78 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Do not buy

Written by LG from Heidelberg

Oct 4, 2007

Wow, I just wrote a review for this the other day saying how great the sound quality was (which it still is). BUT, it skips non stop. I tried to record a 3 hour lecture and i'm missing half of what my prof is saying. I'm so frustrated.

What a waste of time, effort and money.

45 of 61 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

overpriced toy

Written by BM from Reinach

Nov 17, 2006

i wanted to record the sermons in our church, i also think the recording quality is good, but two things disturb a lot: it kills the battery power within 35 minutes (at least on my ipod) and reproduces this hdd sound of the ipod. i thought to have a better solution than those old tape recorders but it's a deception. about 90 $ for such a useless toy, this is not funny at all.

51 of 75 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Beware!

Written by JB from San Rafael

Mar 14, 2007

I'm a pro musician and hoped to use this product to record live music sometimes, as well as spoken word. I was so excited when the sales person at Apple said it would record in CD quality.
The problem is that the mics are so sensitive that they pick up the sound of the hard drive spinning inside my Ipod! That is so anoying and makes the recording useless for me.
I also own a 4th generation 60 GB Ipod and the mic is attached to the top of the ipod rather than the bottom and I don't hear the hard drive spinning and clicking away.

31 of 36 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

terrible

Written by RJ from Princeton

Oct 15, 2007

Frequent Skipping. One third of the recording is gone away. Just terrible.

49 of 73 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Didn't work for me!

Written by SR from Watertown

Jan 29, 2007

I just got a new iPod Nano the same time I bought this because I wanted to record my Economics class. My Professor has really bad handwriting and if you don't keep up with him while he is talking and writing notes, you can't go back to re-read what he wrote! So I thought this would be pretty cool. I used it just at home to try it out and the sound was not good, it had a lot of hissing noise and after I messed around with it for a while I decided to take it back for a refund. Then later that evening I wanted to listen to music on my iPod and it was all jammed up. I had to restore the iPod and I only had the thing for one day! I don’t know if it matters that I used my MacBook Pro to sync my music onto the iPod, but all I know is this didn’t work for me. I’m going to try the other one and see if that one works better.

33 of 45 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Disappointed.

Written by DP from Crystal City

Jan 3, 2007

I was really disappointed by this product. My wife bought it for me as a Christmas present because I wanted to record sound effects and being a musician I wanted to record song ideas with it. The first thing that I noticed was that it picks up the sound of the hard drive running when recording in high quality mode. You can hear the Ipod hard drive start and stop while you're recording. I didn't really mind this but did recording in low quality mode to cut down on the hard drive noise.

I also only had this microphone for three days and I was extremely careful with it due to knowing it's price. It suddenly just stopped working. I pressed record today and nothing was recorded but static. I did this several times to try to get it to work but there was still nothing recorded. My wife and I ended up taking it back to the store and got our money back because I can't see spending money on something that breaks so easily. I enjoyed using it while it was working but it quit working.

So, I had high expectations but I was disappointed by this product.

29 of 38 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

USELESS !

Written by DF from new york

Feb 13, 2009

I bought this at Adorama, and I should have listen to the salesman who told me to buy a real recorder instead. In fact it worked a couple of time in the first weeks, then suddenly trash out (just white noise) 2 very important interviews of 30 min each. great isn't it ? I was able to use it for a couple more ITV cutting every 5 or 8 minutes thinking I might not waste so much of the ITV if one of the short file was corrupted as usual... it eventually worked sometimes and then it's again recording white noise ! This product doesn't even worth one star. I'll bring it back or crash it !

24 of 35 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Incompatible

Written by CL from Memphis

Jan 18, 2007

I was very disappointed with this product. I have an Apple-formated iPod. When I attempted to use this product, it recorded nothing. Not static, not white-noise, not the hum of the hard-drive. It recorded silence for however many seconds I attempted to record. The product was sufficiently connected and my iPod plays my music just fine. When I tried the TuneTalk with my rommate's Windows-formatted iPod, it worked perfectly. We both have the 30 GB iPod video. I called the Belkin tech support, but they were of no help, whatsoever. If anyone has any tips or ideas as to why this happened, please let me know. I'm 2 hours away from the nearest Apple Store, so it looks like I'll be taking a road trip this weekend to replace it.

24 of 39 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Constant audio clipping, Nano locks up

Written by BA from Austin

Aug 4, 2007

I get some audio clipping (distortion) on recordings using the built in mic with autogain on. Even when recording something very quiet, there's clipping.

The TuneTalk Stereo has also caused my Nano to lock up and act very strangely a few times after taking it off. A soft reset fixes the problem, but it's a nuisance.

16 of 24 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

NOT dependable!

Written by MF from Southfield

Sep 12, 2009

I am a linguist doing fieldwork in Central America. You can't even imagine the frustration and fury I feel when after conducting 6-7 interviews a day with the few remaining speakers of a language, only to come home and realize that only four of them have recorded!! Half of the interviews come out as a slight buzzing sound with no sound whatsoever. After a half-hour interview with an elderly person, how can I go back and say, "do-over"? I've tried to play with it to find out what I'm doing wrong why it's not recording well -- if I'm pressing a button I shouldn't or anything, but I'm consistent in my usage. I am extremely disappointed and will never recommend this item to anyone. I wish I could give negative stars.

10 of 13 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

suddenly stops working

Written by JG from Fort Myers

Mar 4, 2007

I had the same problem, it just stopped working one day!

13 of 24 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Still POTS 1.0!

Written by DC from New York

Mar 16, 2008

I bought this POTS a year or two ago and finally logged on hoping something had replaced it. Not here it hasn't.

Literally, this hunk of junk didn't record as well as my little brother's Mickey Mouse mon tape recorder did back in 1975. (And that had a freaky bonus feature -- when you put the battery in backwards -- the tape ran backwards! No one ever believes this).

Anyway, as is the case with so many non-Apple accessory products on this site, do some digging on the internet and GO SOMEWHERE ELSE to buy (and save money, usually too). I have almost never been satisfied with things I bought from the Apple store. And a quick check on Google reveals there are several cheaper products out there that are newer and better reviewed!

You listening, Apple? If so, do us all a favor and replace the moronic and confusing double-search windows with ONE SEARCH WINDOW. Thanks!

16 of 53 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Not the best

Written by SS from Burlington

Dec 6, 2006

This was a horrible product, i have a old ford pinto with 10" subs in the back that are bumpin and all i could hear was a fuzzy starit noise. Dont buy this product!!!

18 of 83 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

I LOVE IT IT 's what iv been looking 4

Written by TC

Nov 22, 2006

:)

23 of 149 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Hard Disk Noise (and Ugly)

Written by JF from Washington

Jul 27, 2006

This is one of three high quality audio recorders that are or soon will be available for the 5G iPod video: Belkin Tunetalk, Griffin iTalk Pro, and Xtrememac Micromemo. The best reviews, as always, are at iLounge.
The Belkin and the Griffin both have built-in stereo microphones. The stereo is useless and built-in means hard disk noise on the recording. Also the Belkin and Griffin lack speakers, and the Belkin has too many buttons and is just bug-eyed ugly.
The Belkin has two unique features. First, it can be used when the iPod is in a case (at least a Belkin case, and probably most others) – a big advantage. Second, the Belkin has a mini-USB port that can be used to charge, synchronize, or – most important – power the iPod while it is recording. This is critical for some users because, due to constant hard-disk usage, a 30 GB 5G iPod can only record 1.5 hours and a 60 GB model 3.5 hours of digital audio before the battery dies. On the other hand, for those of us are not going to carry around an AC adaptor anyway, this is a reason to be annoyed at Apple rather than to choose one iPod recorder over another. (Why couldn't they have kept a small-file, low-power recording option for those of us who just want to record lectures or conversation?)
(FYI, Apple has provided two voice recording quality options for the 5G iPod video: 'CD quality' at 1.4 mbps stereo and 'low quality' at 352 kbps mono – 5.5 times the bit-rate of an iTunes mono download.)
The Griffin is less ugly than the Belkin, but lacks the iPod-case feature and the mini-USB port, and like the Belkin has built-in stereo microphones (i.e., hard disk noise) and no speaker.
My choice is the Xtrememac Micromemo, both because it has a separate (detachable) mono microphone and because it has a speaker. The separate microphone means no hard disk noise on your recordings. (You can also attach better quality stereo microphones, as you can with the other two as well.) The speaker means that you can listen to recordings immediately without using headphones. Also, I would assume that you can use the speaker to listen to songs or podcasts as well as voice memo recordings – a whole new market for Xtrememac.
The main disadvantage of the Micromemo, aside from the lack of the Belkin's iPod-case feature and mini-USB port (and the fact that it's not for sale yet), is that the fools put an on/off button right in the middle of the speaker. This has to mean a lower-quality speaker – and anyway, why can't everything be controlled through the buttons on the iPod itself? (The ideal iPod voice recorder would have only a microphone input, a speaker, and a pass-through dock connector.) But for now, for me, it's the best choice.

448 of 555 people found this useful

Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones

Excellent quality, but totally unacceptable HDD noise

Written by MN from El Cajon

Aug 2, 2006

Overall the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo records excellent sound. I use mine for linguistic analysis of spoken languages.

Unfortunately, about 20 seconds into recording, the iPod HDD starts spinning, and the whir and click of the HDD are picked up by the "excellent" microphone, and render this product unusable. It then starts and stops spinning about every 20 seconds (I use the 5G 30gb).

PROS: excellent sound, line in, small, stereo recording, external power capability, fits iPods in cases, comes with power cable and stand (although kinda tacky).
CONS: horrible HDD sound interference, no built-in speaker for playback - imo, 2 very big cons.

Conclusion: if you want to use this mic to record information, but don't care about quality, it will work. If you care about the actual sound of the recording you're taking, steer clear. I could even hear the HDD during a recording of me playing guitar. My question is, why bother recording 44kHz stereo wav files if you don't care about the sound quality?

The only solution I can see is to buy a male/female dock extension cable so that the mic can be on a cable separate from the iPod. As useful as such a cable would be to many people (e.g., docking iPod without having to remove it from case, putting accessories like FM transmitters in convenient places while maintaining access to iPod), none exists (www.sendstation.com claims to have one in the making). Hopefully waiting for this cable isn't anything like waiting for a mic for the 5Gs....

110 of 120 people found this useful