Gemini IKEY Plus Portable USB Recording Device

by Gemini

Product Features

• Gemini iKey Plus USB Recorder
• Gemini DJ

Product Details

• Item Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• ASIN: B000LNJT2Q
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #33,705 in Musical Instruments (See Top 100 in Musical Instruments)

Product Description

Introducing the iKEY Plus Portable USB Recorder, the second in a generation of products providing a more versatile platform for portable live audio recording. Designed to work with an Apple iPod® or any external USB storage device, the iKEY Plus can record live audio to MP3 or WAV format directly to a USB Compatible storage device - in real time! With endless professional and consumer applications, the iKEY Plus Portable USB Recorder is the most convenient real-time recording tool.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works great so far, February 10, 2007

By 

Herr Frog (Washington DC area) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gemini IKEY Plus Portable USB Recording Device

I have purchased a variety of mp3 recording devices, and have found this one to be very satisfactory so far. I am a court reporter, which means I make recordings of official events for a living. So the functioning of this guy is "mission-critical," as it were. It has not let me down so far. It makes high quality mp3 recordings onto usb flash devices, such as a usb flashdrive, and at the 128 mbt setting, which is fine for my purposes, can record for over 8 hours on a 512 megabyte drive.

It records to a variety of mp3 bitrates, starting with the standard for most downloaded mp3's I believe, 128 bit, which is the one I use, as I am recording speech. Also records to uncompressed 16 bit wav files. I have recorded to compact flash cards and usb flash drives, using both the line and mic inputs, and have gotten highly adequate results. The sound is crisp and clear with little more hum or background noise than my computer using a Behringer preamp.

So while this is no Edirol R1, it actually has outperformed the Marantz PMD 660 which I also purchased before, at least as a portable mp3 recorder. At a quarter of the price of the Marantz, I should add. Offhand, this is designed better than the Marantz in a handful of ways. I would say this is perfect for recording your vinyl to mp3, your lectures, all kinds of stuff. Very handy, and very inexpensive too. The only drawback for some is it is only built to record. It does not play back. For that you still need a machine that can play mp3's or wav files, but obviously if you are reading this post you have it at your fingertips literally.


The other person's post complaining of problems with the microphone input etc., claiming the device has no preamp for mic input is not entirely correct. I can use a mic with it, or a stereo mic, but my complaint is different: the mic input, at least for my ikey plus, is not a stereo input. So on using it I found that my recordings were not in stereo. Rather they were 2 identical mono recordings. Something seems wrong here to me. But the preamp does indeed boost the signal for me. Not incredibly strongly, but I have often found that to be the case. You can do as I do now and run a weak line level signal into the RCA jacks and switch the ikey plus to mic input,and get a major boost, if you want. Works pretty good for me. I use a Church Audio mic preamp, and then run the preamped signal into the ikey plus, and set it at mic level, just as I described. I just recorded a 10-hour hearing for two days in a row just now this way.

So I think this one is absolutely great for recording speech. Much more versatile than any of the @#$%@$ you buy from companies like Olympus that record to lousy proprietary formats, or to overly-compressed formats. And they record in stereo, so long as you use the RCA inputs. I think this device would also be very adequate for recording vinyl, but I haven't tried that one. I have successfully recorded about a couple dozen various government functions with it in the past few weeks since I bought it, and it has done very well for me. I just hope it lasts a long time.

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This added months later: It's still going strong, and has worked without fail on dozens upon dozens of hearings, meetings, etc., many of them being longer than 10 hours. I have also taken it out to a nature preserve with a battery powered preamp and recorded birds and frogs; i.e., your typical nature recording.

So aside from the caveats already mentioned I would still endorse this one strongly. I might add to the caveat this small warning: You may lose your file if you shut down immediately after stopping the recording. you need to give it a couple seconds to finish saving after you stop the recording before you shut it off, I suspect because this simple device doesn't contain smart enough circuitry to delay shutdown until saving is complete. (However, it IS smart enough to save before shutting down due to low battery, as I've learned from my outdoor recording sessions.)

That is one of the little features you don't get with a no-frills gadget like this, and I once learned this lesson to my dismay after recording a long committee meeting in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Fortunately, I always make backups.) But after one time, I just leave it on for a few seconds before shutting down, and it's only happened that once. That minor issue, along with the mic preamp issue described above, I have no trouble working with this, and I think it's the greatest, especially for the price.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a great unit for recording LPs to your computer, July 1, 2007

By 

Shilo (Palm Springs, California) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Gemini IKEY Plus Portable USB Recording Device

I've spent a fortune on various products to get my old LPs into digital format so I can use them on my iPod. I'm not very techno-gifted, so tried to stay away from solutions that involved multiple computer-type steps, software programs, etc. (though I've tried a few of those too). I even bought the $400 TEAC GF-350 direct-from-LP-to-CD recorder (horrible quality on the final CD product; see my Amazon review for that unit if you're thinking about it). Anyway, I saw the iKey Plus unit, read reviews (here and elsewhere) and it sounded great. I bought it and I'm now using it, and with only one album under my belt, it seems to be doing exactly what I want. It's easy to use, and it puts high-quality recordings onto your desktop. You just drag them into your iTunes and rename them, and you're good to go. ONE CAVEAT: I may be the only dummy who didn't realize it, but the unit requires an external storage device of some kind to be attached while you are recording, there is no memory storage built into the unit! I thought I had a defective unit until I figured this out...once I bought a thumbdrive and plugged it into the USB port of the device, it records like a dream, and I'm happy as a clam.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good mono, but no stereo capability!, October 16, 2007

By 

M. Stock - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gemini IKEY Plus Portable USB Recording Device

I recently purchased an iKEY Plus MP3 recorder for a project that requires portable stereo MP3 recording with live monitoring. I thought I had found the most inexpensive solution. The standard digital voice recorders do not allow monitoring, and the Zoom H-2 and H-4 are more expensive (as are other more professional devices).

The problem that I found was that this device cannot record true 2-channel input. All recordings have 2 channels of data, but each channel contains the exact same signal---an average of the two input signals. This is the case through the attached stereo mic, my own stereo mic, or through the RCA input jacks.

This mono-only capability is not stated in the user's manual, nor on the web site, nor in the descriptions here on Amazon. In fact, because of the inclusion of a stereo mic and dual RCA jacks, one wonders whether the creators of this product were purposely trying to mislead the public. I was told by a representative of the manufacturer that the box has been changed, presumably to reflect the device's actual capabilities. My box says nothing about "mono"-only.

If you only want mono audio, and you need live monitoring, then this device is your best bet. The sound quality is improved by using a better microphone. I use the audio-technica ATR35s, which is inexpensive and has a nice long cable. My voice recordings, even at 128 kbps, sound just like me.

If you want true stereo, or want to convert LP collections to MP3, look elsewhere.