MP3 Voices in My Pocket

My handy pocket voice recorder, an Olympus V-90 (more photos here), finally snapped after three years of daily service. So I thought I’d replace it with a model that also plays MP3s and works as a flash drive. But finding the ideal balance has been tricky.

Should I skew toward the music side or the voice side? And should I take the screwdriver approach or the pocket-knife one? Extra features are seductive, but they often obstruct efficiency.

The V-90’s streamlined design made it simple enough to operate by feel. If I heard something interesting on the radio while driving, I could record a quick reminder without taking my eyes off the road. And the V-90 automatically tagged each recording with the time and date, so I know exactly when my infant son was in his cooing stage and when he progressed to screaming. (Interestingly, I discovered that recording those tantrums and then playing them back calmed him down immediately, as he heard how ridiculous he sounded. I’m reminded of a phone Sony developed to battle telemarketers. It worked by repeating their words back to them.)

The longer you have a voice recorder, the more uses you think of for it. I first saw the potential in the mid-’90s when some Sonic Foundry staffers visited my magazine to get the editors’ comments on a pre-release version of Acid. As we spouted insights of varying insightfulness (I asserted that the program would be much more successful if the interface didn’t look like a flat, gray spreadsheet), one of the Sonic Foundry guys repeated our comments into his voice recorder. It felt odd, like he was muttering to himself, but at the same time I realized that he was getting a more complete and accurate record of what we said. (Recalling that day, I have to laugh. It just struck me that Acid really did hit the public consciousness when it morphed into the great-looking GarageBand last year.)

Pocketful of Frogs

Because the V-90 was always at my side, I captured some amazing sounds, like the endless reverberation in the Anaheim Hilton parking garage at 2:00 a.m. and the mass shrieking of hundreds of sex-crazed frogs in a nearby creek. The V-90’s crunchy sound quality (likely 4-bit, 7kHz, ADPCM-compressed) made these recordings more impressionistic than realistic, but still, it was a wonderful audio diary.

Today’s voice-recording MP3 players probably sound at least as good, though most lack the V-90’s handy built-in speaker. If I go the MP3-player route, I’ll probably end up soldering a plug onto an old ear bud and carrying that around so I can check voice memos and impromptu shopping lists.

I decided the features I wanted in a music-playing pocket voice recorder are...

• USB 2.0 interface for fast data transfer
  
• Built-in USB plug for convenience
  
• Driverless USB communication with Windows XP and Mac
  
• Removable, standard battery (e.g., AA or AAA)
  
• Reasonable audio quality (One potential player reportedly crackles every time the ID3 tag scrolls across the screen!)
  

That list ruled out the feature-packed Ultra 8-in-1, which can recharge its AAA battery over USB and host SD memory cards. (The eighth wonder of the Ultra’s world is its ability to function
as an e-mail client.) Ah, well. In addition to being USB 1 device, it looked a bit large and plasticky, though it’s actually shorter than the V-90.

The LAKS MP3 Memory Music Watch, sold in the U.S. by ThinkGeek and BMW, misses on a couple of counts (battery and USB speed), but it’s tempting. I can’t ding it on the battery, of course, but I wish I liked its looks more.

I’m still plowing through conflicting reviews for the iRiver iFP-800 series. The best fit so far seems to be the Creative Labs MuVo Micro N200. Actually, the related V200 would hit all my criteria, as it has an integrated USB plug, but it doesn’t seem to be sold in the U.S.—yet.

One strange thing I’ve noticed with many of these voice-recording MP3 players is that they record in a format that’s compressed far less efficiently than MP3, generating bigger yet worse-sounding files. I suppose that’s because real-time MP3 encoding takes more processor power and hence shortens battery life.

But then I saw Olympus’s latest voice recorder, the DS-2. It’s just 7mm longer than my previous recorder, but sports stereo mics, 44.1kHz recording, and USB upload. Look out, frogs!

So, what killer product am I overlooking?