Music hacks - have you ever...

If yer be mopin', 'tis not stories ya need - but mops and buckets, right?
Or perhaps - stories of mops and buckets, yeh.

Mm, I haven't lost anything quite that completely. But we did once have, with a good colleague of mine, a tape of an interview (with P3t3r Br''tzmann, no less) that was recorded on a dictaphone whose batteries, as it only later appeared, were at the time of taping on the very last edge of dying out. To be precice, teh batteries had got *gradually* worse over the course of that 30-minute conversation. So, to listen back to our damn tape we either needed batteries that had to be in a really similar gradually-deteriorating-on-their-last-legs state or we had to just find mechanical ways to slow down the tape when playing it with normal batteries.
Uaz diffikalt.

Have had a couple of technical problems with cassette recorders over the years, plus with that suction cup thingy for phone interviews.

What kind of digital thing are folks using now for interviews?

I just bought one of these http://www.micromemo.co.uk/ProductImages/iPV-MIC-20.jpg after having precisely that run-down-dictaphone-battery thing happen to me. Seems to work great!

The editor was ok about it, thankfully. There will be paraphrasing, it will be shite. Oh well, it happens.

I had an interview with Keiji Haino where the recording device didn't. It was going through a translator, too. Luckily, I made handwritten notes at the time and had a solid enough memory of the conversation that I was able to make even more notes on the train ride home, since I figured out as soon as I left that nothing had been recorded. I wound up not using any "quotes" in the piece - just paraphrasing our conversation. And since it was for an online fanzine (Perfect Sound Forever), that was fine - I wasn't contractually obligated to deliver a Q&A or anything.