This is the first decent quality recording I’ve made of a street musician heard through a LinkNYC device. I’ve gathered some other type of sounds via LinkNYC but this is the first time I’ve found a musician within close enough range to record in decent sound quality.

For years I’ve captured what sounds I could of subway and street musicians using landline public pay telephones. It’s a very hit or miss pursuit, and I would think a lot of people find the audio unlistenable.

For better or worse the LinkNYC devices are replacing most of the payphones in New York. Sound quality on LinkNYC devices is pretty bad. To make a phone call on these things you must YELL to be heard. In this case the saxophonist was about as close to the LinkNYC device as he could be, so the sound quality is pretty decent for what it is. There are some stray VOIP artifacts and what I hear as aural claustrophobia.

If I remember right this saxophonist was at 48th Street and 7th Avenue.

Two of my primary sources for recording subway buskers had been a certain payphone at the Grand Central subway station, and another at Times Square. The phone at Grand Central has not worked for over a year, and I discovered last week that the Times Square phone does not work. The Grand Central phone is probably down for the count but the Times Square phone should be slated for repair. If not then my days of capturing the sounds of subway buskers through payphones could be over. The pursuit, I’ve said before, has gotten a little long in the tooth. Out of habit, however, I will still drop a couple of quarters into a payphone if I think it will capture an interesting sound.

I’ve lately changed my techniques (if I could call it that) for doing this. I’d been calling a Skype number and recording the sounds to voicemail. Skype does not let you download voicemails directly. Instead I’ve been playing the voicemails back and recording them with Adobe Audition. It’s a bit clumsy but I got used to it.

Last week, for some reason, the maximum allowed duration of Skype voicemails was reduced from 10 minutes to just 2. No one from the famously nonexistent Skype Customer Service team seems able to do anything about it. I remembered I still have a magicJack account, where voicemails are not only allowed up to 10 minutes in duration but the .WAV files are automatically e-mailed to me. So that cuts out having to make what amounts to a recording session any time I want to use a Skype voicemail anywhere outside of Skype.

I also use a Skype call recorder, which allows for recordings of basically unlimited length. That’s not useful for calls from New York’s outdoor payphones, where three quarters will get you about 9 minutes of call time. In the subways and certain other places payphones charge 50¢ for up to 15 minutes of call time. I’ve used the LinkNYC devices to record hours of street sounds, reeling in surprisingly clear conversations between people unaware they are being recorded. I have been slowly working toward piecing those sounds together into a single piece, which is shaping up to sound like a sort of Street Radio.

There seems to be a hard limit of 4 hours on calls from LinkNYC devices. I don’t know if that limit is built into LinkNYC, Skype, or if it’s just a general VOIP standard.