Audio Quality

Apparently it's harder to transcribe interviews that are recorded at low quality.  So, the following email from the transcription folk:

"Currently you're set at 22khz at 16kbit per second

For the Olympus recorders, please use 44.1khz @32kbit or higher to qualify for the Type-1 pricing."

I currently have no idea if this depends on type of audio file (these were WMA), or how it relates to file size / quality selection options on most recorders.  Eventually we need to do an experiment to figure out the best quality we can get with a reasonable file size.  Right now I record to M4A and pretty high quality (technical term...I really need to get this figured out) because those don't need to be very portable.  Then I convert them to Mp3's at 96kbps.  I think.

Anyway, the point is: Until we know better, why not record them at high quality and then convert them down as needed for convenience?

(As a partial answer that question - that's sorta dumb because the most limited storage space in the whole thing is on the actual recorder, so that process just adds a bottleneck to a chokepoint by making the files biggest on the smallest storage space.  Ayap.  Sounds good.)