Digital Recorders - another nifty gadget.

David Allen has long talked about carrying a small dictaphone (I believe the first one he was using was a tape unit) with you to record thoughts in a car, while walking - anywhere the universal capture device doesn't quite work. Because of the nature of my business, I've been using a dictaphone for years to prepare reports and letters, usually to tapes of varying sizes.



My company has recently switched to an all-digital system, and look out! These things are great. The unit is the Olympus DS-4000 recorder (and for those that care, the transcription units are the Olympus AS-4000 Transcription Kits, which obviously are all software based). The recordings are crips and clear, way better than anything that was ever achieved on tape, and the folks who do the transcriptions love them. We use them to record dictation, conversations, pretty much anything.


The unit comes with 5 default folders, labelled "A" through "E". Normally, the units are plugged in via USB or their cradle, and everything automatically downloads into the software, then is uploaded into the FTP site where our transcription experts take their work. I've modified mine so that only items dictated in the "A" folder automatically download - things in "B"-"E" don't (I only use A and B anyway). This means that, as I'm driving along, I can record item after item in B, download them to the software, and then play each back as I transcribe it into a task in my Next Action lists.


Each folder can hold 199 seperate recordings (I might get 25 on a trip to work if I have the radio off the whole way and the juices are flowing), which is quite a lot. We get 5 hours of high-resolution recording time (11 hours of low res) out of a 32MB xD picture card, which is plenty - but the cards are swappable, so you could use whatever size you wanted up to 1GB to get tons of recording time, although I'm not sure you will ever need it, unless you are a student recording a full day's worth of lectures.


The unit is very intuitive to use, and does not require a great deal of training if you have used a slide-switch dictaphone before. (For what it is worth, slide-switch units are so intuitive that I'm not sure why anyone would even consider a push button unit except for the slight reduction in cost). Once you are used to the basic features, you can learn about stitching recordings together, selectively deleting sections, etc. - although if most of your recording is to capture NAs, then how much stitching of 3 second recordings are you going to do?


They record in a format called Digital Speech Standard, or DSS (.dss file extensions). These are playable by the desktop software, which can also be used to easily export them as .WAV files to be burned to a CD.


These units are definitely not cheap. As this is a professional grade voice recorder, they go for about $450.00 USD. Mine was provided by my firm, as we standardized on them, but the truth is they are worth every penny. Ours came with a great leather (pleather?) case that gives a nice up-scale feel to them. They are highly recommended.