digital recorder

Go to best buy and find the cheapest one the have.

Then go online and find it for less on Amazon. You'll end up getting a really good olympus, or sony with folders and all that fun stuff for like 30 bucks instead of 50-100

 

I got a pretty cheap one from Walmart for $40. Not sure of the model number but it's a Sony and it's a pretty popular one among the sports writers in my area.

As an aside, anyone on this board have a voice-to-text converting program? I hate transcribing notes and would rather sit back and let some program do it for me. (Probably the worst part of this job, in my opinion).

Also, how long do you guys typically keep your interviews on tape before canning them?

 

I am using an Olympus VN-4100PC which think is the best that I have used. I previously used a cheaper Sony recorder that up and disappeared, perhaps my kids decided to "move" it.

I bought the Olympus for about $60 and it has a USB connection. The only thing I don't like is that when you are fast forwarding through the recording you can't hear what the person is saying. On my old Sony even if you were fast forwarding you could make out what the person was saying.

I'm sure you could spend good money on one for better performance, but for $60 you can get a good one that will work well.

 

Love me some Olympus. Can't go wrong with "The Recorder of the Gods".

 

Most of the Olympus models, or at least the ones I've used, have three speeds of playback -- fast, normal and slow. Comes in handy when you want to skip ahead but don't know exactly where the part you're looking for is in the recording or when you have a fast talker and you don't want to stop 1,000 times while transcribing.

 

Voice-to-text technology hasn't been perfected. The problem is, you need to train the unit to recognize a voice, which it can't do because of the number of people you interview. Yeah, that would be great. Maybe it could even write our stories for us.

I usually erase interviews ASAP. Why clutter the thing up? My Olympus can save them to my computer if I have to.

 

I just bought a Sony ICD-8500 at Best Buy for $65. I don't use it as much as many of you do but it's been pretty good so far - even if I'm afraid of dropping it or losing it because it's so small.

 

Sony or Olympus. Either one is great.

 

Something to think about:

If this is your first digital recorder, you might not think you need the ability to transfer files to your computer.

You will.

You might not believe me until you're on your way to do an interview and realize you only have 20 minutes left on the recorder and you have a bunch of stuff on there for the enterprise project that you hope to run next month, so you can't delete it. If you have it backed up on your hard drive, you can go ahead and delete it to make space. If you took the cheap route and don't have that capability, you will be sorry.

Don't be fooled when you see these recorders hold 75 hours or some such thing, because if you're like me, you'll want to use the high-quality recording setting, so it will probably only hold one-fourth of that. My advice: Go big.

 

My recorder failed me for the first time yesterday. I'm doing this blow-out feature on a basketball player and somehow the thing cuts out the whole 10-minute session. So I have to paraphrase everything he says and lean on coach and teammate quotes.

It worked out okay, but I'll never take notes for granted again.

 

Never asked before, and I'm sure mine's archaic, but how's the Sony M-200MC.
Best of both worlds, big and cheap.