Olympus VN_240 Digital Voice Recorder

The Olympus VN-240 is a digital voice recorder with a lot of good features and at a great price. Let's face it, tapes, cassettes and other recording media are out and digital is in.

I wanted to get a digital recorder for interviewing people for freelance writing assignments and searched the web and stores for a decent one that would not cost very much. I was looking at one that would be less than fifty but with a few functions. I wanted to be able to play it directly to my computer to record and edit interviews I do. I also want to be able to use my speech recognition software to turn the recording into text.

Batteries needed to be the regular AA or AAA kind, not some expensive kind. And I wanted a smaller size to be able to carry it with me on the go. I looked at the few models for less than fifty that I could find and very quickly narrowed my search down to a few. One from RCA was close to what I wanted but the Olympus VN-240 from Radio Shack had all the features I wanted and cost $39.99. The one thing that other recorders for less than fifty dollars did not have, the output for listening or hooking up to a microphone input on my computer. With the earphone jack I can hook my microphone right to the recorder and play into my computer. Using the Windows Encoder I record my digital conversations onto my computer letting the voice recognition that comes with Windows XP translate the conversation for me. Sure it's not fool proof but it's better than trying to do it all by hand, and much easier. The recorder works very easily with four folders to record into. It is just like a windows folder system, you record into a separate file under a folder for different conversations so you can keep track of everything you need to. The folders come in two types, three are for regular recordings and a forth, called S, is for a dated recording. You can record into it information or a daily diary and it is recorded by the day and time of the recording instead of by the folder and subfolder.