Digital voice recording

Over the weekend, I got an Olympus DS-2 digital voice recorder. My purchase was influenced by the enthusiastic review at O'Reilly.

I tried it out yesterday at a group meeting. It was amazing; I was sitting sideways towards the speaker and I still managed to get an excellent recording. It even picked up comments from the audience. I recorded in Stereo SP format (frequency range 44.1 kHz, 64 kbps). There's an even higher quality stereo recording mode that offers 128 kbps which is standard mp3 quality! I think the DS-2 is one of the few digital voice recorders to offer a built-in stereo microphone. The playback speaker on the (tiny!) device was remarkably good and there's also a noise-cancelling option for playback which I really liked. The DS-2 records in the WMA (Windows Media Audio) format. I'm not entirely happy that it's in a Microsoft file format, but at least it's easily convertible with sound utility software. Everything is recorded digitally in the onboard memory of the device, so no messing with tapes. After you make a recording, you can transfer it to your computer with a USB cradle.

The major drawback of the DS-2 is that the player only has 64 MB of memory. That means you can only record about an hour on the highest quality mode. What were they thinking?! Memory isn't that expensive nowadays.

In the future, I may try using the DS-2 as an audio diary (for those passing brilliant thoughts...maybe). I highly recommend the Olympus DS-2 for all your learning needs.