Choosing a Voice Recorder

Once upon a time, I owned the ultimate voice memo recorder. It was about 3 inches high, maybe 2 inches wide and it fit perfectly in my hand and my pocket. It had one control—just one. Push down to record, push up to play back. If you pushed up hard, it fast forwarded. It was fully digital, with perhaps 90 seconds of recording time in the loop. It was always on, running off a double-A battery. I could use it in the car without looking. Pick up, dictate, put down. When I got home, I fast forwarded back to the start of my dictation and then listened and transcribed.

Why can’t I find anything that simple and that usable anymore? At some point, it broke and I bought an expensive Olympus digital voice recorder to replace it. When I wanted to dictate, I had to wait for the unit to power on. A full five to ten seconds passed before I could even start hunting for the teeny record button. The unit provided no fewer than 9 small and hard-to-use controls that had tons of options and no sense whatsoever. It was an engineering piece of garbage, and a high-priced one at that. My Olympus never got much use, unlike my old reliable recorder. And I have never found another recorder quite so perfect nor quite so usable again.

For the moment, I’m using a fire-sale VoiceIt VR-1000 from VXI. It does a lot of what I need, but it’s big and heavy and hard to carry around. Can you do better? Send your suggestions to nitterbog at gmail.com and I’ll summarize some of the best ideas later this week. Thanks!

VR-1000 [VXI]

Die Dulci Fruere