Olympus WS-321M Digital Voice Recorder and WMA Music Player Review

I have been using mini cassette recorders, digital voicepens, and PDAs to record lectures and my own thoughts for years. This one blows them all away, in terms of both usability and sound quality. It is my first Olympus, and it is clearly the product of generations of improvements they made. I have not bought a gadget in a long time that keeps giving me GOOD surprises instead of disappointments. Worries that a recording will be lost because the battery ran out during a recording are eliminated by the fact that: 1. there is a nice battery indicator that you can check before beginning. 2. It uses one AAA, which is easy to find anywhere, and easy to carry a spare. if you see the battery is low, just pause the recording, put it on Hold, and put in a new battery. 3. The battery lasts over 8 hours anyway. How many recordings require continuous 8 hours? That sure beats fumbling with the old 30-min minicassettes! The stereo internal mic is superb, even at the medium quality setting. The usability of the controls is excellent, and most functions can be done blind, without needing to look at tricky menus. At the highest quality setting, I still get quite a few hours of recordings onto the 1GB memory. And transferring talks and MP3s into and out of it is perfectly simple--slide off the battery compartment revealing a full-size USB, plug it into the computer, and it appears on the desktop as a removable disk (in Mac OS X). Drag & drop, unmount and yank, and go. They even included a little extension USB cable, in case the body of the recorder would bump into adjacent wires on your computer. You can put marks anywhere in a recording while recording or during playback. That makes it easy to find important places again. You can play back slowed or sped up by up to 50% (or less) to either blaze through a boring lecturer, or scrutinize one with complex concepts. You can lock the controls so you don't accidentally switch off during a recording, or switch it on in your pocket and waste the battery. The screen has a backlight for recording at dark performances or auditoriums, or playing back at night. I recommend getting an external mic if the noise of handling the buttons and the recorder is a problem. However, it does have very good "limiter" circuitry (ALC), reducing the volume of my fumbling and coughs so I don't blow my speakers out on playback. I am delighted how fast it activates using voice activation--Not a syllable is missed when set to 13-15. It does lose syllables if you have it set to "dictate" (low mic sensitivity) and voice activation, unless you put it right by your mouth. But on Conference (high mic sens.) it is just great. And the internal speaker is amazingly good--Loud and clear. Menus are intuitive, but they included a pretty good manual with it. Finally, it is very small and light, pocketable enough to be unobserved in your shirt pocket, but not so small as to be hard to operate the controls. Two design improvements I would make: put the mic and headphone jacks in two different places, and put the headphone jack away from the internal mics because rubbing the wire (if recording while wearing headphones) causes noise. This is about the only complaint I can think of. Amazing.

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Product Description:
Stay organized and on the move with this high-class storage device and powerful music player. Record meetings or notes and even store large documents to bring from one computer to another. The easy USB input lets you plug the WS-321M right into the computer for fast results. Built-in stereo microphones and a Stereo Extra-High Quality (STXQ) mode let you record and play in superior-sounding audio. There are five other recording modes including STHQ, STSP, HQ, SP or LP. The no-hassle Windows Media Audio (WMA) format works seamlessly with your PC. You can conserve memory with the Variable Control Voice Actuator that records only when sound is sensed. Continuously record for 21 hours with one AAA battery. And up to 250 songs can be stored and played in impressive stereo sound.

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