The Attic

Welcome to the fifty-fourth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind’s Technology podcast.

Episode

Listen to the fifty-fourth episode of the Access On podcast (Browser).

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Timestamps

Here’s what you can hear in this week’s episode, and when.

• Register for our Accessible Devices showcase 0:00
• Introduction to the Zoom Podtrack P4Next 1:59
• Dimensions and orientation 5:54
• First start, setting up the recorder 16:53
• File List 21:03
• Sound Pads 22:12
• Mic Settings 26:48
• SD Card 28:13
• File Transfer 28:23
• Audio Interface 33:02
• System 39:32
• The Tone function 45:19
• AI Noise Reduction 47:51
• Bringing in a guest via smartphone 50:24
• Use cases beyond podcasting, and comparing your accessible recorder options 53:56
• Closing and contact info 1:03:51

Transcript

Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. On this week’s show, we are looking ahead to our accessible device showcase seminar scheduled for later this month. This episode is devoted to a demonstration of the Podtrak P4next recorder from Zoom. We investigate the capabilities of what is arguably the most accessible podcast recorder ever produced and how NFB affiliates might integrate a device like this to preserve our history and improve accessibility. It’s Jonathan Mohsen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome to episode 54 of Access On. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Now, we’re going to look ahead first before we get into the big feature of today’s episode to tell you about the Accessible Device Showcase Seminar. It’s coming up on December 17th from 1:00 until 5:00 PM.

Consumer electronics make great holiday gifts, so the National Federation of the Blind, in partnership with the Maryland Department of Disabilities is hosting an Accessible Device Showcase to help you fill your gift-giving and personal wish list with the latest in accessible technology. From home appliances to leisure activities, come learn about the newest accessible devices. Now, you can register for the Accessible Device Showcase Seminar by going to nfb.org/cena. That’s nfb.org/C-E-N-A. That’s for the National Federation of the Blind’s Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility. And then choose the events and training link, you’ll find a registration link there. This should be a great seminar with all sorts of interesting gadgets to explore. 1:00 PM on December 17th, we look forward to seeing you there.

Welcome to this demonstration of the Zoom PodTrak P4next recorder. This is a long demonstration, so I’ve segmented it by chapter. If your podcast app or device supports it, you can skip forward and back by major sections of the review to get to the material that interests you. It also allows you to use this review as a handy audio reference in future should you decide to purchase one of these units.

I’m producing the beginning of this demonstration on the recorder itself with a Heil PR 40 dynamic microphone connected to input one of the recorder. Each of these four microphone inputs in the recorder has 70 dB of gain, which is plenty to drive the most hungry of microphones. The Heil PR 40 is a fairly quiet mic and I have plenty of gain left over and I hear that some of the more hungry Shure microphones work just fine when you plug them into this recorder. No need for a cloud lifter to boost the signal.

The intro music you heard also came from the recorder. I started it by pressing the button of one of the sound pads on the device. Much more on that later.

I’m delighted to bring you this comprehensive look at what may be the most accessible podcast recorder ever created. When I started podcasting 21 years ago now, it required you to do a lot of geeky things to get your podcast published, and, while there were portable recorders around at the time, battery life wasn’t great. They weren’t designed specifically for podcasting and they certainly didn’t have accessibility features built in. Nowadays, generating great audio is cost-effective with decent microphones available at a budget price. Publishing a podcast is straightforward and the PodTrak P4next is purpose-built for podcasting, plus it includes a voice guidance feature which makes every function accessible to blind users with the exception of the speaking of file names, and we’ll come to that later in the review.

Zoom Corporation has made this demonstration possible. They have donated this unit to the National Federation of the Blind’s International Braille and Technology Center, so if you ever pay the IBTC a visit here in Baltimore, Maryland and you have an interest in getting your hands on this device, be our guest. We appreciate Zoom’s donation. Zoom hasn’t heard this demonstration before we’ve published it and it had no influence over its content. The P4next joins a growing family of accessible audio equipment from Zoom. We’re now in the desirable position of having a wide range of accessible recorders to choose from. With choice can come complexity, so I’ll talk more about which accessible Zoom recorder might be right for you toward the end of this review.

This recorder is a successor to the PodTrak P4 that was released back in 2020 and it’s been popular in the podcasting community and also in the blind podcasting community because it’s been usable with a good cheat sheet and a lot of care.

With the PodTrak P4next though, we have accessible menus eliminating the need for those cheat sheets, memorization, guesswork, and potential disappointment, even heartbreak when you guessed wrong about what the recorder was doing and you didn’t get that recording in the way that you wanted. Throughout this demonstration, you will hear the voice guide feature in action and I’ll be walking through every aspect of this recorder from its physical layout to advanced features like multi-track recording, sound pads, audio interface capabilities, and much more. So let’s dive in and discover what makes the P4next such a powerful tool for blind podcasters. Despite this recorder being a powerful podcast studio, it’s easy to carry around. It weighs just 300 grams and that’s when you have two AA batteries in the recorder. Its dimensions are 4.96 inches wide, 4.72 inches deep, and 1.57 inches high. That is 125.9 millimeters wide, 120 millimeters deep, and 40 millimeters high.

Before we turn on the P4next, let me give you a thorough orientation to the device. This description is based on the official blind user orientation guide that Zoom has created specifically for this product. And it is a credit to how seriously Zoom takes accessibility, that they do create these guides specifically to help blind users get to know the recorder. It is also a credit to Zoom that after feedback from the blind community, they have substantially improved their general documentation’s accessibility, and I found the P4next user guide very accessible with actual labels for the buttons that has made a huge difference.

So let’s place the P4next on a table in front of us so that the side with the eight round knobs with multiple buttons faces upwards. You should orient it so that the four smaller knobs of the eight are nearest you. And I’m going to start from the far edge and work my way forward.

Row one contains the main transportation controls. At the very back, you’ll find three buttons in a horizontal row. On the left is a round power button, which is a little bit recessed compared with the others so you can easily discern it. Press and hold this to power the unit on and off. Obviously, it is a toggle. In the middle is a large rectangular record button that starts and stops recording. It’s tactually distinctive and it’s very easy to tell what button you press to start recording. On the right is a round play/pause button. Press this to start, pause, or resume playback of recorded files. This button also performs actions while you’re recording. Precisely what functions it performs is configurable, and I’ll show you that later in the options.

Below these three buttons is a horizontal row of rectangular buttons. From the left, the first one is the sound pad A button and it will also take you to the beginning of a file when you are playing a file. Next is the sound pad B button and that is also the backward button while you’re playing. You can hold it down to move back through a file. If you press the third button, you will have sound pad C, and that is the forward button, so it’s equivalent to the functionality of the back button. And the fourth button here is sound pad D, and that will stop playback when playback is taking place. The buttons will always perform their sound pad function other than when a file is playing back on the recorder, the logic being that you don’t want to play a sound pad on top of a file that’s already playing.

Then you’ve got the display. There’s no button here, it’s a rectangular area, which is tactually discernible. The fifth button is the menu key. When you are in the menu, it will function as the back key. Next to the menu button is the sixth one, which is called tone, and we’ll talk more about this in a little bit, but when you’re in the menu system, it moves you up in the menus. Button number seven is called comp. It is a compressor built right into this device and it will also move you down in the menu system when that is active. And the eighth and last button is the AI noise reduction button and also the confirm button.

Next, you have a row of four rectangular buttons and they mute the inputs from microphones one through four. So when you’re not using a particular channel, it’s ideal to mute that channel. For example, I’m only talking here on one microphone, so I have microphone one unmuted, but I have all the other ones muted. In the firmware that’s shipped with our unit, and there is no update available, it seems that the mute functions are not sticky. That is to say if you turn the recorder off and back on again, all four inputs will be unmuted.

Below the mute buttons are four round input level knobs. They’re larger than the ones below it and they adjust input levels for microphones one through four. They stop turning at their minimum and maximum levels, so you do have clear points of reference there. And immediately below are four smaller round headphone volume knobs that adjust the volumes of the four headphone outputs that are on the front of the unit. They also stop at their minimum and a maximum point. On the front edge, you’ll find four headphone jacks aligned horizontally. These are stereo mini jacks. Moving from back to front on the left-hand side of the unit at the far end is a narrow 48 volt phantom power switch.

You set it towards the back to turn this on and towards the front to turn it off. You’ll only want to enable this if you’re using a condenser microphone. And there’s only one switch as opposed to a switch for each input. So I presume that if you’re using a mix of condenser and dynamic microphones, enabling phantom power isn’t going to do the dynamic mics any harm. Near the middle is the microSD card slot cover with an indentation for your fingernail to pull it open. When you’re inserting a microSD card orient the edge of the indentations towards the front, so the terminals face down. Insert it until it clicks into place. You won’t need to force it. It kind of slides in on a spring, and you press it again to eject the card.

There are two USB-C ports on this device, so the first one is the USB-C port for connecting a USB AC adapter or portable USB battery, 12 watts or higher, 5 volts, 2.4 A or higher. Finally, is the USB data port. That’s the type C as well, and that’s for connecting to your computers, smartphones, or tablets. At the far end of the right side is the input select switch for channel four. Channel four is a bit special because if you set that input switch towards the back of the unit, then input four will give you XLR inputs. In other words, you can plug a microphone into it.

If you set the switch towards the front of the unit, then input four becomes a smartphone or computer input. The first hole closer to the front is the audio input connector for connecting a smartphone or BTA-2 wireless adapter. I don’t have one of those BTA-2 adapters to try, but I do have a cable that has a TRRS connector at one end, which is what we want in this case, and it actually terminates in a USB-C cable, so that’s good for plugging into an iPhone or Android device, and we’ll show you that later in the review.

The next hole is a power connector for the BTA-2 wireless adapter. On the bottom of the unit, there are rubber feet at the far left and right corners, and near the center is a latch for the battery compartment. Lift this while pushing it to open it. The unit uses just two AA batteries. When installing, you first extend the ribbon inside the compartment, you place the batteries on top with the negative ends facing the springs and don’t let the ribbon get caught between those batteries. If you’ve done all that correctly, it’s a simple process to remove the batteries. You just pull the ribbon while holding them in place. To close the battery door, you insert the two tabs at the far end and then press until it clicks. All very intuitive.

While we’re talking battery, word has it that you get about three and a half hours recording time with the two AA batteries. That’s assuming they’re alkaline batteries and that you’re using dynamic mics. In other words, with the phantom power switched off. So if you’re going for a long recording session, it’s a good idea to get yourself a battery pack and plug that into the USB-C port. A wide rubber foot is at the near edge of the device. The back features four XLR input jacks from left to right input one, two, three, and four. These jacks have built-in mic, preamps, and accept XLR plugs. It’s important to note that unlike the connectors on the Studio Series and the Essential Series, these inputs are only XLR. They’re not combo jacks. XLR is a standard used by professional microphones. There are screws above and below each jack for securing connections.

A couple more important points to note in terms of what this recorder does not do. Unlike the Essential and Studio Series, there’s no built-in speaker on the unit, so to hear the voice guide, you’re going to need to connect headphones or a portable speaker to one of the headphone jacks. Also, unlike the Essential and Studio Series, there’s no microphone onboard the unit itself, so to record, you need to connect something to it, usually at least one microphone and possibly your smartphone or computer. So just to paint a picture of what this recorder is capable of, you could have four guests locally, each with their own microphone and their own headphone jack, or you could have three guests locally and bring somebody in via smartphone and everybody who is plugged into those headphone jacks will hear each other and the guest from the smartphone and you could add a fifth person if you want, if you connect a computer or a smartphone via a USB port.

Then there is also the sound pad channels, so you can play material from the sound pads and everybody will be able to hear this. The mix-minus capabilities of this recorder give you a lot of power. For example, you could bring one or more guests in from Cleanfeed, so if they’re using good quality microphones, it’s just as if they were in the studio with you at this point, so that’s great if you’re having a panel discussion with people over the internet, but you might want to make the whole thing available via Zoom so that participants can join and hear the conversation. That is all possible without any bleed through thanks to the mix-minus capabilities of this recorder. It’s deceptively powerful.

Now that we’ve oriented to the layout, I’m going to switch back to Reaper on my PC so I can connect the PodTrak P4next to my mixer and let you experience its user interface. Let’s go through the experience of what it’s like to start the Zoom PodTrak P4next for the first time. I’m going to press the power button, which is on the top left of the top surface. It’s slightly recessed, so you have to press it deliberately.

P4next:

Guide sound. Voice plus beep.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And you’re immediately taken in to a menu where you can choose the voice guide settings that you want. This is an impressive feature of the Zoom recorders that are accessible. They just come up talking. You don’t have to know any sort of secret option to enable it. If I press button three.

P4next:

Beep only.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And button three again.

P4next:

Off. Voice plus beep.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Now, we’re back to voice plus beep and I’ll press button four to accept that choice.

P4next:

Date, time. Okay.

Jonathan Mohsen:

It’s important to set the date and time correctly because that will have an influence over the way that your files are named. I’ll press button three and that will scroll us through the different things that we have to set.

P4next:

Year.

Jonathan Mohsen:

I’ll press okay and I’ll be able to choose the year.

P4next:

24, 25.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And it’s already on 25, so I’ll accept that. Now I’m back in the previous menu, so I’ll press button three again.

P4next:

Month.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And I can choose the month by pressing button four. Now we’re in that menu, so I’ll press button three to scroll through the months.

P4next:

12, 11.

Jonathan Mohsen:

11 is what I want. I’ll press button four. And now we’re back in the menu.

P4next:

Day.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And we’re on to day now.

P4next:

30.

Jonathan Mohsen:

We’re pretty close. I’m going to press button three to go down.

P4next:

29, 28, 27, 26, 25.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And press button four. I’m back in the previous menu, so I’ll press button three.

P4next:

Hour.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And button four to go in to set the hour. I’ll press button three.

P4next:

23.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And we’re on 23. So the quickest way to get around to where I want to be is to press button two in this case.

P4next:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, … 7.

Jonathan Mohsen:

It’s quite responsive as you can hear. And now I will press button four.

P4next:

Minute. 59.

Jonathan Mohsen:

I need to press button three a few times.

P4next:

58, … 49, … 45. Okay.

Jonathan Mohsen:

We can choose okay to accept the date and time that we’ve set.

P4next:

Battery type, alkaline.

Jonathan Mohsen:

That’s correct. So I’m going to press button four, but if we want to look at the different options, let’s go through them.

P4next:

NiMH, lithium, alkaline.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And I’ll accept that by pressing button four.

P4next:

Done. Rec standby. Remaining time, over 100 hours. Battery level, high.

Jonathan Mohsen:

I have a 512 gigabyte microSD card inserted into the PodTrak P4next, so I have plenty of storage. When you insert an SD card for the first time, it’s a good idea to go into the menu and choose system and you’ll find a utility to format the SD card according to Zoom’s specification. In my experience, it does a pretty good job of doing this without the formatting process, but Zoom does recommend it. And if you’re taking a new microSD card out of its packaging and inserting it, it certainly can’t do any harm. Just be mindful that if you’re taking a microSD card from somewhere else and you format it, you’re going to lose all the data on that card. There are also some tests that you can perform, one that’s quite quick, one that takes longer and is more thorough, and it’ll write to the card, It’ll do some tests to make sure that you’re not going to lose any data or get glitchy audio as a result. If you’re using good quality name brand microSD cards, you should be in pretty good shape.

Now, let’s take you for a tour of the menu system in the P4next. It is completely accessible other than when we get to looking at files. And there are workarounds of sorts for that that we’ll discuss in a moment.

So let’s tour the menu system and I’m going to press the menu button. To remind you of where that is, you’ve got your four buttons on the very left of the device for the sound pads and then a gap where the screen is, and then the next one, so the fifth button from the left, is the menu key and it is the first button in the right-hand group of four, so I’ll press that.

P4next:

Menu. File list.

Jonathan Mohsen:

I do have some files on the device now because I recorded the intro. If I press the right-hand key at the very end, which is the enter key in this mode, you’ll hear that we’re not hearing the files being spoken. So I can right and left arrow through here and not hear the file. However, if I press the play key, the top right-hand round button.

P4next:

Playing.

Jonathan Mohsen:

There you go. I’ll just pause that. And you can hear the intro that we heard before. So there is no way to hear the names of the files, so it’s not fully accessible in that regard, that’s because Zoom is using pre-recorded prompts. It would be wonderful if we had text-to-speech on these devices in the future, but that’s not where we are now. So the trick is to arrow around and press play to find out what file you’re on.

I’m going to press the back key, which is the same as the menu key. It takes us back once we’re in the menu system.

P4next:

File list.

Jonathan Mohsen:

We’re back on file list. Now I’ll go down.

P4next:

Sound pad.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And we’ll take a look at the sound pad system.

As I mentioned in the description, there are four sound pads on this device. They come pre-configured with sounds, but you can override those and put your own sounds in. If you’re going to do that, they have to be WAV files recorded at either 44 or 48 kilohertz and 16 or 24-bit. Be sure you’re not sending an MP3 files or FLAC files or anything like that because that’s not going to work. And they have a folder where they live that’s pretty self-explanatory, but I will show you that when we connect the recorder to a PC and browse it as a drive.

I find the four sound pads a little bit constraining. For example, I might want to use for sound pads for Access On, but I might want to use a different series of files if I’m using this for my internet radio show. So I thought about suggesting that it would be great if Zoom implemented a system of banks where you could load different sound banks. Then I thought be careful what I wish for, since there’s no text to speech on this. If they did implement a system where you could load sound banks, then you probably at this point wouldn’t be able to hear the names of those banks and that would make it much more complex to select the right thing accessibly.

So we will choose the sound pads option.

P4next:

Sound pad level.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This is a master control which governs the levels of all sound pads, but you can adjust each sound pad’s level individually. So I’m going to go right.

P4next:

Sound pad A.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And we’ll have a look at what we’ve got in sound pad A. I’ll show you actually, because if I just press that button, that is the theme tune that we used before. If I press it again, it’s gently fading out. And that’s configurable and we’ll show you that. So I’m going to press enter to go into sound pad A’s settings.

P4next:

Sound assign.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And the first is sound assign. If we go in here, we can move through the sounds on the device. The voice guidance is not going to speak the names of those files, so you’ll have to deploy the same trick that I just showed you using the arrow keys to select a file and then pressing play to find out what it is.

We’ll go right.

P4next:

Play mode.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And this is the play mode. You have several options here, so I’m going to press the enter to investigate them.

P4next:

Fade out long.

Jonathan Mohsen:

That’s what’s selected at the moment, fade out long. And it takes around about five seconds to fade the file entirely. Very nice for an intro music bed that you gently want to have disappear once you start to talk, but there are other options as well. So let’s press enter and look at them.

P4next:

Fade out long, one shot.

Jonathan Mohsen:

One shot is ideal for a file that you just want to play all the way through. If you were to press it again while it’s playing, it will just start playing from the beginning. I’ve set a couple of these up in fact. So if I press the key for sound pad C and if I push it while it’s playing, it just starts from the beginning. And similarly with sound pad B, we’ve got the little sweeps there for Access On. So you can configure that. That’s what the one shot key does. We’ll go on.

P4next:

Pause.

Jonathan Mohsen:

If you choose pause, then when you press the button to stop playback, it will pause at the position that it was at and then you can push it again to resume. This could be handy if you’re using it for some sort of commentary.

P4next:

Loop.

Jonathan Mohsen:

The file will just loop around and around until you stop it.

P4next:

Hold.

Jonathan Mohsen:

If you have this mode on, then you have to hold your finger on the sound pad for it to work.

P4next:

Fade out short.

Jonathan Mohsen:

That’s a short fade out. It takes about a second to fade out and then we’re back to…

P4next:

Fade out long.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And we’ll press enter to maintain that.

P4next:

Fade out long set.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And that’s how all four sound pads work. So we’ll go back.

P4next:

Play mode. Sound pad A. Sound pad.

Jonathan Mohsen:

We’re back in the main menu.

As well as the obvious podcast use case, one other use case I can think of where this would be great is if you were a journalist calling into a radio station and you were playing little bits of actuality from something that you visited. Maybe you were doing a little bit of a commentary on the event and you had, say a politician or someone who you were covering and you could just put these on the buttons and play them at the appropriate time. You can also, in a very handy trick, use the PodTrak P4next itself to create sound pad recordings, and you do that by pressing the record button and the key for the sound pad you want assign the recording to at the same time. The next selection on the main menu is this one.

P4next:

Mic settings.

Jonathan Mohsen:

If we go in here, we can have a look at how we can configure the microphones.

P4next:

Low cut.

Jonathan Mohsen:

The low cut filter reduces low frequencies to minimize wind noise, vocal pops, and rumble. And you can toggle low cut on or off for each of the microphones independently. This is on by default, which is appropriate for most podcast scenarios.

P4next:

Limiter.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This prevents distortion by automatically reducing excessively loud signals. Like low cut, the limiter can be enabled or disabled per channel and it’s on by default, which helps protect against unexpected loud sounds or hot mic levels. This is particularly important on this device because it is not a 32-bit float device unlike so many Zoom recorders these days. It is good to see that there is an improvement in the specs over the PodTrak P4 in terms of the files that this device is making. The P4 did cop some flack for only coming in at recording at 44 kilohertz 16-bit and the PodTrak P4next records at 48 kilohertz, 24-bit, so that does give you a little bit more frequency response and bit depth to play with, but it still isn’t 32-bit float, so be very careful when you record. You probably want to leave the limiter on and maybe do a test recording and see how it’s working out for you. And those are the two items on this menu. So we’ll go back.

P4next:

Mic settings.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And go to the next option.

P4next:

SD card.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This is the option that I talked about earlier where you can test the SD card, you can prepare it for first use if you want to be super cautious, it’s all in there.

P4next:

File transfer.

Jonathan Mohsen:

When you enable this feature, your Zoom PodTrak P4next can become a drive on your computer. You can copy files off the device, that’s probably the most common thing that you can do, but you can also copy files onto it and that’s particularly relevant if you want to use the sound pad feature.

I’m going to connect to the USB port that is closest to the front of the unit on the left-hand side. Remember, there are two. One only supplies power and the other is data capable. So when I connect that USB cable, it’s going to acknowledge it on the recorder. Let me just slot that in.

P4next:

Data okay.

Jonathan Mohsen:

So that’s a reassuring message. And now when I press enter.

P4next:

Data okay.

Jonathan Mohsen:

It says data okay again and I got a little sound from my Windows computer that you didn’t hear that says that everything is connected now and a drive has popped up. So let’s explore this.

I’m going to go to File Explorer on my Windows device.

Computer:

Home list box, quick access…

Jonathan Mohsen:

Now, the letter of the drive will vary depending on what other devices you have on your system, so you may want to browse this computer section to find it, but I know in my case it’s always going to show up as drive E. So I’m going to go to the address bar by pressing alt D.

Computer:

Address bar, edit home.

Jonathan Mohsen:

I’m going to type E: and press enter.

Computer:

Items, view multi select list box, working on the… E, items view multi select list box, P4next multi-track not selected. File folder one of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Let’s take some time to get acquainted with this file structure.

Computer:

P4next multi-track. One of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

If I go in here…

Computer:

E P4next multi-track. Items, view, multi select list box 251125110103 not selected. File folder one of three.

Jonathan Mohsen:

So we have sub folders in the multi-track folder and they will be named based on the date and the time at which the file was recorded. So if I go down…

Computer:

251125110222. Two of three.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And then…

Computer:

Work. Three of three.

Jonathan Mohsen:

There’s a file there that you don’t want to touch because it seems to be important to their operating systems. So we’ll go up.

Computer:

251125110222. Two of three.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And I’ll press enter.

Computer:

Shell view. 251125110222 mic 1.wav not selected. One of five.

Jonathan Mohsen:

We have four tracks plus if I go to the bottom…

Computer:

251125110222 soundpad.wav. Five of five.

Jonathan Mohsen:

There’s your sound pad file. That file will be in stereo. The other four will be in mono. If you are also recording from a USB source or a TRRS source or a Bluetooth source, those tracks will be in stereo. I’ll go back.

Computer:

Items, view, multi select list box.

Jonathan Mohsen:

So now we’re back in the root multi-track folder. I’ll go back up one more level.

Computer:

E, items, view, multi select list box, P4next multi-track, file folder one of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

So we’ve got the multi-track folder there if I go down.

Computer:

P4next settings. Two of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This is a system folder that contains the settings changes that you’ve made.

Computer:

P4next sound pad. Three of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And here’s the sound pad folder. This is something you may want to play with. So if I go in here…

Computer:

E, P4next sound pad, items, view, multi select list box, P4 view intro.wav not selected, Microsoft WAV sound format, 5,199 KB. One of three.

Jonathan Mohsen:

I called that file P4intro. You heard that music before.

Computer:

Transition1.wav two transition4.wav.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And I have two of the Access On transition pieces of music. So the trick is to copy WAV files into this folder and then assign them to the sound pad that you want. I go back up.

Computer:

E, items view … 251125110103.wav. Four of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And in the root folder, we have a stereo mix of everything we record.

Computer:

251125110222.wav. Five of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And this is significant because there are certain things like the AI noise reduction that only get applied to the stereo mixes. So it will make multi-track mixes and it will make stereo mixes as well. If you want to change that, we’ll have a look at how to do that in just a bit.

Computer:

ZoomP4next.sys. Six of six.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And there’s another system file as well. So it’s pretty simply structured. It’s a good idea, I think, to get something off the SD card as quickly as possible. Maybe put it in cloud storage, particularly if it’s an important recording that you would be devastated to lose. So get into the habit of connecting this as a drive or if you want, you can take the SD card out of the recorder and put it in some sort of card reader if you have one of those and copy the files across. But it is a good idea to get it off that physical media as soon as possible. So that’s how you work with files on your computer from the Zoom PodTrak P4next.

After the file transfer option in the menu, we have this.

P4next:

Audio interface.

Jonathan Mohsen:

As well as being a standalone recorder, the Zoom PodTrak P4next can be an audio interface, which means you can connect it to your computer or your smartphone and it can take the place of the audio built into your computer or smartphone. You can record using software such as Reaper or GoldWave or Sound Forge or Audacity on your PC or your Mac. You can also record using any number of apps on iOS or Android. And when you’re using this recorder as an audio interface, the very nice thing is that you can record on the recorder itself while also recording on your application of choice on your computer. That gives you a bit of redundancy. If you’re doing a really important recording and you want to make sure that you are recording it, you can record in two places at once, and that’s a very effortless process. Let’s explore the menu options pertaining to this function.

P4next:

USB level.

Jonathan Mohsen:

If we choose this option, it will determine the output of the USB that’s sent to your computer, how loud you hear it.

P4next:

0 dB.

Jonathan Mohsen:

So if you press the left hand of the two menu keys to go up, you will increase the volume. If you press the right hand of the two menu keys just by the enter key, you can turn the volume down. Let’s go back to the menu.

P4next:

USB level.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And continue through.

P4next:

Mode.

Jonathan Mohsen:

You have the choice of two modes and they work quite differently. We’ll go on and have a look.

P4next:

Multi-track.

Jonathan Mohsen:

If you choose multi-track, this is suitable for working in a multi-track recording environment such as Reaper or Audacity or any number of other multi-track applications that are out there. What this means is that each of the four inputs will have its own track. The external input that can be used for Bluetooth or a TRRS cable to your smartphone or other device will also have a stereo track. So it may show up as two tracks if you’re looking at it in a mono user interface, the sound pad player will also have two tracks so that you get stereo with the sound pads if you wish and so on. So this gives you plenty of flexibility as you do some recording. If you’re going to be using this for serious recording and you want to do mixing afterwards, then this is the way to go. The next option …

P4next:

Stereo mix.

Jonathan Mohsen:

simply combines everything into a stereo mix. So this is a little bit like what you’d get if you played back the stereo mix that the recorder makes in WAV format. There are some advantages in this. If you are broadcasting or doing any kind of streaming, then this is the way to go because everything is coming out of one source. You can control the balance by using the input knobs to set all the microphones at about the right level so they sound the same. You might like to adjust the volume of your smartphone directly from the smartphone itself if you have that connected to that particular input, and everything comes out of one source.

This is a good time for me to mention that the audio subsystem in the Mac is excellent and generally just recognizes what you throw at it. So you don’t need to install anything if you’re using this device with a Mac. On the other hand, if you’re using this with Windows, you will need to go to the Zoom website and download the drivers for Windows for this particular recorder, the PodTrak P4next, it’s a very simple install process and when you do that without the recorder attached, you can then attach the recorder and it will detect it. And when you go into your digital audio workstation such as Reaper and you look under ACO devices, it will show up there. So let’s go back to the previous menu.

P4next:

Mode, mix-minus.

Jonathan Mohsen:

The voice guidance said something pretty magical there and those words will set many audio geeks’ hearts going pitter-patter with excitement. This is the mix-minus feature. It’s a very good feature of this recorder. When you have a remote guest calling in via your computer or phone, you don’t want to send their own voice back to them because that creates echo and feedback, particularly if you have a little bit of latency because they’re coming in via a Voice over Internet Protocol technology. If you’re using something like Google Meet or Microsoft Teams or the other Zoom cloud meetings and various technologies like that, those conferencing systems actually try and compensate for that. They have technology called echo cancellation. The difficulty with that is that for those of us who want to record using professional tools that don’t add all sorts of compression and echo cancellation that can affect the sound, we would rather use technology like Cleanfeed or Riverside or any number of other options that don’t introduce those sorts of technologies that can potentially add artifacts. So you do need mix-minus in a situation like this.

And this actually takes us all the way back to telephone hybrids on radio stations from days of yore. So you’ve got a couple of options here. When this is set to on, it means that your remote guest who’s coming in via the USB hears your voice and the sound pads and other participants, but they’re not going to hear their own voice coming back to them as an echo. So it’s great for podcast recording. Those are the audio interface related options. When you connect to this device as an audio interface and it’s showing up in Reaper, for me, it’s a little bit confusing in terms of getting to know the different inputs. If you look at something like the Focusrite Vocaster Two, which is also playing in this same space of trying to cater directly to podcasters, but of course, it is only an audio interface. The Focusrite Vocaster Two is not a recorder. So there are some distinctions there. It’s a slightly different product category.

But what I like about it is that when I look at all the different inputs in Reaper, they’re clearly labeled. For example, host microphone, guest microphone, and on and on. When I have a look at this in Reaper at the moment, I’m just seeing a large number of inputs that are numbered. So for me, it’s been kind of trial and error or consult the user guide to find out what input corresponds to what function. It would be very helpful and speed things up if in a future version of the ACO driver for this product, the inputs were clearly labeled by name. But it works well enough. I’ve done some brief testing, it seems to be reliable. So with this product, you have a podcast studio virtually in your pocket as well as a pretty acceptable audio interface. We’ll go back to the previous menu.

P4next:

Audio interface.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And go down.

P4next:

System.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And we’ll have a look at the system functions.

P4next:

Accessibility.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This is the function that is making it talk, so we’ll go in and take a look at the options here.

P4next:

Guide sound.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This is the same options that we had when we set the recorder up. So your choices are voice plus beep, beep only, and off.

P4next:

Volume.

Jonathan Mohsen:

You can choose low, medium, and high. I prefer to have it on high because I wasn’t getting quite enough output from the recorder when it was on medium before. So it’s a personal preference. And those are the options that we have under here.

So we’ll go to the previous menu.

P4next:

Accessibility.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And go down.

P4next:

Play key in recording.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This is an important function that you might want to set according to your specification because it determines what the play button will do when you are recording. Let’s review the choices.

P4next:

Pause only.

Jonathan Mohsen:

When you press the play/pause key while you’re recording, the recording will simply be paused and nothing else will happen or…

P4next:

Pause and mark.

Jonathan Mohsen:

You can pause the recording and also insert a marker in the file. This could be very handy if you want to come back to a particular point in the file.

P4next:

Mark only.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And this is my personal preference, so I’m going to press enter in a moment to select this option. When you press the key, you’re not going to pause the recording at all, but you are going to insert a marker. And the reason why I like this function is that if I’m recording an interview and I ask a question badly and I think, “Oh, man, I’ve got to go and fix this up, I’ve got to do some editing here.” I can press the key and it will simply place a marker in the file which makes it easy for me to find that problem part of the file when I bring it into Reaper or some other editor and then I can clean things up. So I’m going to press enter to choose this.

P4next:

Mark only. [inaudible 00:41:13].

Jonathan Mohsen:

And from now on, whenever I press the play/pause key while I’m recording, it’ll just insert a marker. I’ll go back to the previous menu.

P4next:

Play key in recording.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And go down.

P4next:

Recorder mode.

Jonathan Mohsen:

You have two modes here. One is called master only. If you have that option set, it records a stereo mix of all of the inputs. So you’ve got the computer, the phone audio, and the sound pads. You may find that this is adequate if you just want a finished mix straight out of the recorder. On the other hand, multi-track records the stereo mix, you can’t turn that off, but it also adds individual files for each microphone. Those are mono tracks. You also get a stereo mix of the USB input and the sound pads. So you would keep this option on if you want to edit and mix in a digital audio workstation later. The other options here are…

P4next:

Date, time.

Jonathan Mohsen:

We set the date and time at the beginning of this demonstration.

P4next:

Display.

Jonathan Mohsen:

You can turn the display down if you want and that might save you a little bit of battery. So let’s go in here.

P4next:

Brightness. Bright, medium, dark.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And now I’ve set this to dark.

P4next:

Bright, dark.

Jonathan Mohsen:

It’d be interesting if they had a off option for the screen, wouldn’t it?

P4next:

Dark set.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Now, we’ll go back.

P4next:

Brightness, power saving.

Jonathan Mohsen:

This will determine how quickly the recorder will hibernate if you don’t touch it for a while.

P4next:

One minute, three minute, five minute. Off. 30 second, 1 minute.

Jonathan Mohsen:

One minute. Seems about right. So I’ll choose that

P4next:

One minute.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And go back.

P4next:

Set, power saving.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And those are the only options on this menu. So we’ll go to the previous one.

P4next:

Display, battery type.

Jonathan Mohsen:

As we saw earlier, the options here are alkaline, NiMH, nickel-metal hydride, and lithium. Remember to set the battery type correctly in the system settings here so the battery indicator is accurate. As we saw when we were doing an orientation to the recorder, there is a USB port on the PodTrak P4next designed specifically for power options. So I tend, with these recorders, for a critical recording, to take a power bank with me and I connect it to the USB port and that gives me some peace of mind that I’m in really good shape in terms of not running out of batteries. You can also purchase a USB power adapter and plug it into the wall when that’s convenient for absolute peace of mind.

We also have an option here for…

P4next:

Firmware.

Jonathan Mohsen:

And you want to check on the Zoom website from time to time or if you are really into podcasting, you might want to subscribe to The Blind Podmaker email list where these recorders are discussed frequently. You can send a blank message to creators-subscribe@theblindpodmaker.com, that’s creators-subscribe@theblindpodmaker.com because normally, somebody discovers when there’s a new firmware update for one of these recorders quite quickly and messages there when that’s the case. What we’ve found with these Zoom recorders is that sometimes they don’t just issue bug fixes, but they can also sometimes issue substantial feature updates to the recorders. So it’s worth keeping your firmware up to date to make the most of your investment.

And that is the menu system.

Next, I want to demonstrate three features of the Zoom PodTrak P4next that alter the audio.

I am processing most of this review through Auphonic, which does a wonderful job for podcasters and others dealing particularly with spoken word audio. But for this part of the recording, we’re going to switch Auphonic off so that you can really hear for yourself the difference that these features are making in the recordings that you might make. There could be a little bit of variation and level, I apologize for that, but I figure it’s not really worth demonstrating these features unless I can get Auphonic completely out of the process for this part of the demonstration. So let’s do that.

I’m now recording once again on the Zoom PodTrak P4next with the Heil PR 40 in the studio connected to it, and this is the raw recording. There is no processing going on at the moment. What I’m going to do in a moment is press button two, and that is the tone button when we are in this mode, and the tone button adjusts the signal to make it sound clearer and more suitable for podcasts. So I’m going to press that button now and you can hear, oh, gosh, yes, you can hear that that has changed.

I didn’t get feedback from the voice guidance that it had taken effect, so you don’t hear tone on while you’re recording. In fact, I don’t think the voice guidance works at all when you’re recording, but I’ll just toggle it off. So now tone is off. I’ll press it again and the tone is on again. So this is a preset EQ curve and Zoom says that it is optimized for voice, so tone is now on and tone is off again. It’s worth noting that the tone enhancement is only applied to mic inputs and not to the USB or smartphone inputs.

Button three on the recorder is labeled compressor and that increases the sound pressure while avoiding clipping. This evens out volume differences and it makes your podcast sound, I guess, a little bit more polished potentially. So I’m going to switch this on now and now, the compressor is on and whoa, I’m sounding very compressed at this point. So if we keep the compressor on and you can definitely hear the compression working here and I switch tone back on, then we have a very different signal at this point because we’ve got the tone and the compression on.

You can probably hear a little bit more room bounce actually as a result of all of this. And that’s interesting because the Heil PR 40 is usually quite a directional mic that avoids picking things up. So if you want things to sound really punchy, then you can go ahead and do this. I will make this comment while I have this feature on so you can really hear the effect, and that is that I would prefer personally to record raw with these features switched off, then go into a digital audio workstation like Reaper to make adjustments manually or put it through Auphonic where I have a lot more granular control, because this is a simply on-off situation. In that regard, it’s not quite as flexible as the Focusrite Vocaster Two that I mentioned earlier because there is a compressor on that device, but you can configure it in software by choosing from a range of presets or also tweaking various parameters. With this, as Bonnie’s mother used to say, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

Now, I’m standing outside our house and it is a fairly quiet moment actually in the metropolis of Baltimore where I am, but I’m going to show you a feature called AI Noise Reduction. This feature is also available in the Essential Series, and I think it may be in the Studio Series as well now, but certainly it’s in the Essential Series. So the idea is that you press this button, the AI button, and then it will take a sample of the noise. So they recommend that you remain quiet while that’s taking place and then it should filter it out. So I’m going to press the button, it’ll take a short sample of noise and we should hear what noise there is reducing a little bit.

So we can definitely hear that now. The noise has quietened down. We can also combine this with other features. So I can turn the compressor on now and you hear that the compressor is in effect, but it hasn’t actually significantly increased the background noise. By contrast, if I turn off the AI noise reduction, you can really hear more noise now that the compressor is on. And if I switch AI noise reduction back on, it is taking another sample. And I think the sample that it took reflects the fact that the compressor is on and it really did cut back on that noise significantly.

I think I would still be inclined to just record raw, but if you are streaming live and you want noise reduction to happen in real time in that live stream, this is pretty attractive. Now I’m going to turn the tone feature on. So now, we’ve got everything running. We have the tone running, we have the compressor running, and we have AI noise reduction running. I’ll switch AI noise reduction off. You immediately hear the noise increase. I’ll push it again and this time, it will take a sample with the tone feature enabled. And there you go. You hear the noise reduction turning way down. So those are some of the features that are built in to the PodTrak P4next.

I’m back in the studio, I’m still recording on the Zoom PodTrak P4next we still have the tone setting enabled and we also have the compressor setting enabled. And because it’s good to be environmentally friendly, actually, the truth is I just haven’t gotten around to replacing the sound pads that I’ve put in here before, we’re going to recycle this music for the segment.

Welcome to this edition of the PodTrak P4 test podcast. And I have my iPhone connected via a cable. It’s got a TRRS connector connecting to the Zoom PodTrak P4next and a USB-C plug at the other end, which has plugged into my iPhone. So a direct connection. And on FaceTime audio, we have Bonnie Mohsen. Now, welcome to you, Bonnie.

Bonnie Mohsen:

Good afternoon, everybody. Great to be here.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Could you hear that music when it was playing down the line?

Bonnie Mohsen:

I did. I did. It sounded nice.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Okay, so I can tell a famous Jonathan dad joke and go… And you can hear that as well?

Bonnie Mohsen:

Mm-hmm. I certainly can. Then I can tell a joke back and you can do it again.

Jonathan Mohsen:

There you go. That’s very good. So you can hear that. And the audio, how does my microphone and everything sound to you?

Bonnie Mohsen:

It sounds great. I mean, it really… Because I’ve seen the Zoom recorders and they’re quite small and it sounds amazing actually.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Awesome. Well, thank you very much for being on the podcast. I appreciate that.

Bonnie Mohsen:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Okay, goodbye.

Bonnie Mohsen:

Goodbye.

Jonathan Mohsen:

Now, I have just performed a two finger double tap to hang up the iPhone. And this is another thing, it’s a benefit and a potential risk that you should be aware of because most of us listening to this podcast will be voiceover users. It would be important to put your phone on do not disturb and probably mute your speech and even turn voiceover off just to make sure that you get clean audio coming in. But the other thing that you can do with this since it is picking up voiceover speech, is you could use this anytime to record app demos because voiceover is coming through. I mean, if I flick right here…

Voiceover:

Messages. One unread message. Smart home folder, 12 apps, one new item.

Jonathan Mohsen:

You can hear that. And we’ve got two choices. We have a stereo mix being created of this whole thing, in which case, you’d have to be particularly careful of your levels, but otherwise, you have a multi-track version being recorded as well where your microphone will be in one track and you’ll have a stereo track comprising the audio coming from your iPhone. So a great way to record technology demos. And of course you can also use this as an audio interface and connect your PodTrak P4next to a computer and you can do technology demos in exactly the same way.

Now I’m back in the studio with our usual configuration and production techniques to conclude this review. Just before I do that, a point of clarification. When you use the AI noise reduction feature, you will hear it through your headphones so you know what effect it’s having, and you will get it on the stereo mix, but you will not get it on each individual track. In a way, this is a good thing because if you switch it on and you’re not happy with what it’s done, you’ve always got a fallback. You’ve always got those individual tracks to fall back on if you’ve got multi-track recording enabled so that perhaps you can see if you can achieve something better in your studio with post-production tools.

Although Zoom has designed this recorder for podcasters, there are other use cases for it in the blind community. I’ve been riveted all over again by a book I’ve read several times, Floyd Matson’s Walking Alone and Marching Together, which tells the story of the National Federation of the Blind’s first half century. The Federation is serializing it in podcast form right now and you can subscribe to Walking Alone and Marching Together in any podcast app. One of the reasons why the version we are serializing is so compelling is that it contains many recordings of the actual speeches quoted in the book as they were delivered.

The Federation has done an outstanding job of recording and preserving our history. And we may not realize it when we just do our thing every day, but when we, as members of the Federation, assemble at state convention or attend other meetings that impact the lives of blind people, we are metaphorically writing the next chapter of the organization’s history. A lot has changed in a little under two years. In February 2024, Zoom delighted the blind community with the announcement of the Essential Series, which included voice guidance, and they’ve steadily added to the collection ever since, including Voice Guide and the Higher Quality Studio Series. All these accessible Zoom recorders are a low-cost, high-quality means of capturing and preserving our history. They can also assist with making meetings more accessible. But as I said at the beginning of this review, with choice comes complexity. So let’s look at some of the options and when you might use one over another.

All the recorders in the Essential and Studio Series share some important features that distinguish them from the P4next.

The products in the Essential and Studio lines can all record in 32-bit float WAV format. This means that you get huge dynamic range and they’re going to capture very soft and very loud sounds, and those very loud sounds are going to get captured without clipping thanks to dual AD converters. The H5studio and H6studio even supports sampling rates all the way up to 192 kHz for high resolution audio. So if I try and de-geekify that, in practical terms, if you’re recording unpredictable audio, things like multiple people with varying volumes or live music or ambient sounds, or you simply want the peace of mind that you can’t accidentally clip, the 32-bit devices are very forgiving. You don’t need to set precise gain. You can literally record without riding levels, and you can adjust later in post-production without any quality loss or adding any hiss.

I think this is particularly advantageous for blind people who can’t see the meters. And for all that the good that the voice guide has offered, we don’t get feedback about levels. Once you get distortion into a recording, when that recording is made with older technologies, it’s there for good. It’s very hard to remove it. 32-bit float avoids the need to make test recordings to see if you can hear any distortion when you play it back. And for people like me who have a hearing impairment but love to work with audio, 32-bit float, which is not available on the PodTrak, P4next provides more peace of mind. All the H Series recorders have on board microphones for stereo recording. The H6essential and studio include a detachable X/Y mic capsule and they support other capsules like mid/side or shotgun mics. That may or may not matter to you depending on where and how you want to use the recorder.

In contrast, the P4next has no onboard mic. You’ve got to always use it with an external microphone. All the H4, H5, and H6 units use XLR/TRS combo jacks for their inputs, which accept XLR plugs or quarter inch inputs, which are useful for line level sources. That means that if you need to record audio from a mixer’s output or feed the recorder from a sound board at a venue, the studio and upper end of the Essential line is much better suited. So for interfacing with professional audio gear or capturing music from a keyboard, that kind of thing, the H Series offers much more flexibility. Now, that is not to say that you can’t connect PodTrak P4next to a mixer. You can. Just be aware that the four XLR inputs are at microphone level, which is a lot hotter than line levels. So you would need a special attenuator to ensure that you don’t overload the recorder when you try to connect it to a mixer.

The Essential Series has a built-in speaker for a quick playback and to output voice guidance audibly without headphones if you need that, which can be very useful. But the P4next relies on headphones for its voice guidance audio, and for hearing any recordings. All these devices can act as USB audio interfaces and can do so while recording to the SD card at the same time. That is incredibly useful. The P4next interface mode is designed for podcasting and it combines mix-minus for USB callers automatically. The Essential and Studio recorders do not offer this mix-minus feature, and that could be a deal-breaker in certain situations and steer you towards the P4next.

For streaming a conference, the P4next will easily mix your local mics and an online meeting, such as on Teams, WebEx, Google Meet, or the other Zoom, with no feedback. Whereas one of the other recorders could send multiple mics to the PC, but routing the PC audio back to participants may require tweaking and it has only one headphone out. For smaller meetings like chapter meetings, I can foresee a scenario where a chapter uses a PodTrak P4next and a couple of microphones to stream the meeting clearly over Zoom and record that meeting. Using a cable from one of the analog output jacks to a good quality speaker, you can use the recorder as a mixer and offer amplification.

And that still leaves three headphone jacks free. It gives you the potential to connect a small assistive listening system or offer those jacks to deaf/blind people who bring their own personal assistive listening system with them that has the capacity to connect to a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. If you use the recorder in this way, connected to speakers, you could convert the presidential release to a WAV file, add it to a sound pad, and play it over the speakers at the chapter meeting with the press of a button, and it would stream clearly and directly to people connected to Zoom. Or if the TRRS Jack is free, you could connect a Victor Reader Stream or similar device with the right cable and play the presidential release from it. It’ll be heard in the room and also clearly by people on an online meeting.

This setup is also good for making good recordings of smaller meetings like the breakout sessions at state conventions. So while all can serve as audio interfaces for your laptop, the P4next is plug-and-play for virtual meetings in a way that the other recorders can’t do. This favors the P4next for scenarios involving live two-way communication. The P4next shines for multi-user monitoring. The Studio and Essential lines only have one headphone output. The H6studio and essential have one headphone output plus a secondary line out that could be used with a headphone amp if you need more headphone jacks, but that’s another gadget to carry. So if you have multiple people who need to hear the audio, say a panel of presenters who each want headphones or in-ear monitors, the P4next is unique in handling that out of the box.

In terms of control, the H Series devices have more complex menus. They do more things. For example, you can set phantom power per channel, you can change the recording format, you can do mid/side decoding and many more features. The P4next has a very simple menu system and layout optimized for podcasting. For example, dedicated sound pad buttons, mute buttons, et cetera. And it’s worth noting in case that’s not obvious, there are no sound pads on any of the other recorders. There is no doubt that the PodTrak P4next is a simple user interface with many physical knobs controlling things. And it does a lot. If you are a chapter or affiliate leader and you think there might be value in incorporating one of these devices into the way you work, please contact us at the National Federation of the Blind’s Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility, and we’d be pleased to help.

The Zoom PodTrak P4next sells for 179 dollars. That’s 20 dollars less than the original retail price of its 2020 predecessor. Yet there’s a lot more functionality. And when you take inflation into account, it’s clear that the device is offering a lot more for considerably less. This device is a pleasure to work with and if you record for podcasting purposes primarily, I don’t think you could go wrong with this one.

That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to accesson@nfb.org. That’s accesson@nfb.org. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, accesson@nfb.social. That’s accesson@nfb.social on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement-only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to accesson-announce-subscribe@nfbnet.org. That’s accesson-announce-subscribe@nfbnet.org. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org, or phone us, 410-659-9314. That’s 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the Nation’s Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.