Digital Dictaphone?

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Do you use them or have seen friends and enemies flashing ‘em around? Well I’m considering buying one… okie here’s the bit I am keen to hear about:

  • Which one do you recommend?
  • Is it digital?
  • Is is small enough to be carried around in the pocket?
  • Is the battery life reasonable (vague i know, use your judgement)?
  • Is it mac friendly?

SO-YOU-KNOW: Well I did buy Omnioutliner Pro and it does the job surely but I need to cart my PowerBook around for that, hence a dictaphone

7 thoughts on “Digital Dictaphone?”

  1. How about just using a digital camera that does voice recording? My Pentax Optio S40 (and the rest of that series) does a great job of voice recording… it takes pictures, too ;)

    On my 256MB card, I can record ~4hrs of audio. My battery will last probably two hours — and, as a bonus, you can turn the LCD backlight off to extend that further whilst recording.

    I carry it around in my pocket without any problems all the time.

  2. Hi there

    I’ve got a better idea for the Ipodders out there ( people who are fortunate enough to have an Ipod). Buy the microphone attachment for it. Belkin and Griffin. The Belkin model has great reviews in last month’s Australian PC User (may have gotten the month wrong) :P

    My niece used it to record her notes for her year 11 exams. It worked great, except its not very good in replaying the recordings on the Ipod itself, but once you connect and update your Ipod with Itunes, all your recordings are fine. After that your recordings play fine on the PC or the Ipod. You will need version 2.1 and an Ipod with dock connector or later for your Ipod for this Belkin model to work.

    Its small, and draws power directly from your Ipod, so you virtually have all the recording time as to what the Ipod can store. The recording qualities are good with no or little hissing. Cost is about AUD$40 for the Belkin model

    Yeah the Pentax Optio is a great little camera with loads of function without the size and the bulk of other camera types.

  3. Oh i forgot! Belkin model DOES NOT WORK WITH IPOD MINI or IPOD SHUFFLE. Found that out the hard way. But i am a kind uncle and borrowed my Ipod Photo to my niece during her exams as she only has the Ipod Mini

  4. now then, amit that sounds cool: for those insparational moments when it proves just alittle inconvinient to be yelling into the pinhole microphone of your powerbook as your being chased down the street by an eager and enraged angry mob waving money at you chasing dinosours in the rain, when all you care about is your idea that might just blow away like a leaf. ^_^ what i would recomend is for usability -any- as long as its small, those ones that take little tapes are good quality, and if you download a little program like ‘sound studio’ (you can get it on version tracker) you can easily transmogrify the sound into an itunes format in your mac with one single cable.

    i have to dissagree with the digital camera idea though, their just not ment for that purpose; so you spend more time fumbleing with an awkward device to stretch a minute of recording time that will prohibit you from storing any morre pics on the card, dont do it, besides a conventional cheep small tabe dicto will do the job perfectly and you can leave it running/ recording for so much longer, get home and type up your revolution.
    or if it has an audio out, record it into the mac ! maybe sony?

  6. Nah, forget cameras and iPods if you are serious.

    You should look at the proper tools for the job, those like the Olympus DS-4000 are great and I know plenty of people that use them – iPods and digital cameras dont let you edit out your mistakes, and usually dont use any compression in their recordings.

    The DS-4000 (more info here) is fully Mac compatible, can fit in your pocket, gets around 20hrs record time before needing a recharge (battery/charger included) and is the most popular professional recorder around.