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Now, here are some of my thoughts about voice recorders:

Blind people have always liked to use such recorders to easyly make their notes. With many digital recorders out now, things should be much easier, then at the time, when tape was nearly the only medium, voice recorders worked with. One can jump from message to message quickly with a digital voice recorder and to record something, one doesn't have to do a lot of cuing to find the end of the last recording.

However, this automatic searching of the end of message also causes some problems or at least requires the builders of such recorders to implement some additional function: Because, if one wants to overwrite, for instance to delete a made mistake, how can one do that? Also, if one wants to listen to the end of the last recording, the recorder may not allow this, since it always goes to the begining of the message, last recorded when this recording is stopped.

Olympus builds some recorders, which function like a tape recorder. I call these machines overwrite recorders. If you're in the middle of a message and press record, the message will get overwritten, beginning at the position, where the playback was stopped. And if one wants to hear the last seconds of the recording, one just presses the rewind button, it will review the message, although, no reviewing noise can be heard. In other words, they tried to make this work exactly as a tape recorder. Examples of such machines are the Olympus D-1000 and the Olympus DS-150.

But most digital voice recorders will just record a new message, when the record button is pressed, no matter, where you are in a message, that you've previously heard. I call these devices append recorders. These machines also are not at the very end of memory, when a recording is stopped. They're at the beginning of the message, last recorded. This makes it very easy, to hear the BEGINNING of the message. All of Sony's digital voice recorders work like this. Olympus's DS-2000 and VN-180 are two additional examples of append recorders.

But how can one listen to the END of the message last recorded, and how can one overwrite something, to correct mistakes?

With most append recorders, one can record another message, play it and then press and hold the review button. This will first scan back to the beginning of the new message and then go further backward, so that one gets deeper and deeper into the message, the end of which one wanted to hear. Sony offers an additional method: While recording a message, one can press and hold the review button. This will stop the recording and scan into the message beginning at the end of it. I find both methods a bit cumbersome and think, that voice recorder manufacturers should find better ways, to acomplish this task.

Now to the overwrite question: With the Olympus DS-2000 and VN-180, one simply can't overwrite text in a message. With newer Sony models, one overwrites by pausing a message at the position, where one wants to overwrite and then presses the record button twice. I think, that this is a good solution. It's better, then simply letting a recorder operate like a tape, because it's too easy to press record and accidentally overwrite stuff, with such overwrite recorders.

I think, that if I'd construct a voice recorder, I'd use the Sony style overwrite method, but I'd put an additional key onto the machine, which would play the last ten seconds of a recording when pressed, while playing it.

What do you think?

Michael Lang