[blindLaw] digital voice recorder

[Al Elia]

I use an old (15+ years) Olympus DS recorder (I think its  the DS51, though it might be the DS 61) that has limited voice guidance. It’s pretty great (includes limited noise reduction, has different modes for recording in different settings, and is about the size of half-a-candy bar, but probably difficult to obtain at this point.

I’ve used my phone as Sai suggests, using an app called ClearRecord Premium, which has built-in noise reduction. However, it’s less reliable than a dedicated device because of notifications/calls/etc, occasional hiccups because the phone thinks it should stop when the phone is locked, etc. All of these things can be addressed by tweaking phone settings, but all of that is a pain in the neck when all you want is to be able to press a button and then never have to worry about whether the recording is happening.

If you can stomach the expense, I’d suggests the new Victor Reader Stream 3. It’s very compact, entirely accessible, and uses standard SD cards and USB c to  make transferring files a breeze. It’s a bit overkill for just a voice recorder, but its accessible features make it the best choice if you can expense it (uses standard mp3 files for recording, allows for bookmarking points of interest in an audio file when listening, etc). It also is a fully-functional reader  that can read DAISY and ePub books, as well as Word DOCX and PDF  files. You can add audio bookmarks to those files as well. That is particularly handy when reviewing long PDFs. Note that the PDF’s have to include accessible text, so must be OCRd if they are scanned.

Best of luck.

On 5 Aug 2023, at 7:10, Sai wrote:

> Given you're not doing this for unusually high audio quality like radio,
> why not just use a smartphone or laptop app?
>
> Most will name it by the timestamp, and in any case the date-created or
> date-modified timestamp will be on the file metadata.
>
> In some chat apps, like Signal, you can message yourself, and you can
> record audio messages. Those would also have timestamps, though it's not as
> easy to transfer the files.
>
> Sincerely,
> Sai
> President, Fiat Fiendum, Inc., a 501(c)(3)
>
> Sent from my mobile phone; please excuse the concision, typos, and
> autocorrect errors.
>
> On Fri, 4 Aug 2023, 18:55 Josh Loevy via BlindLaw, <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Hey All,
>>
>> I'm in the market for a digital voice recorder that will let me export
>> files
>> to my hard drive, mostly time entries for later transcription. I'm getting
>> a
>> lot of mixed signals from what I'm seeing online, does anyone have one they
>> use in their practice and like?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Josh
>>
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