Olympus WS-500 Digital Voice Recorder (Silver)

I bought this as a backup to my other Olympus recorder (which I frequently lend out). My other recorder is an Olympus WS-100 which I bought 4 years ago. It was one of the first digital voice recorders ever made. It has served me well.

This unit contains a number of improvements over the WS-100 and the WS-400.

When I bought this, I was afraid I would have to carry around a USB cable with me. However, this unit has a little slide button on the side which extends a built-in USB connector. Plugging this into a USB port is a snap.

This unit is a little more compact than the WS-100. It also seems to solve the record delay which was a time vampire on the WS-400. This unit starts to record immediately on pressing the record button.

I would give this unit five stars except except the menu is almost indecipherable without spending an entire day memorizing and studying it. This means that you pretty much have to have the manual...Read more

As a musician, singer/songwriter, I started to find a need to record my music ideas. My phone has of late been recording a lot of small samples, but I wanted something with better quality. After asking around, Olympus seemed to be the best option. I first came to Amazon and felt confused by the different options. When I went to Olympus's website regarding their Digital recorders, it was a big help. They have charts which compare their models and it was easy to discern what models contained what features. I wanted a model that could plug into the computer and had two mics for a speaker effect and that's what I got for a good price.

So regarding the actual recorder, like I said the 2 mics are nice for recording guitar, voice, piano... etc. Not the best for drums, but you could have figured that out. It's not flimsy, it fits into my pocket and it takes 1 AAA battery that can recharge (provided). It's a pretty straight forward piece of hardware and the only thing I...Read more

I bought this recorder basically on the back of the other reviews here. Up to this point I would just use my laptop and a mic, and record into my Cakewalk program. But I wanted something more mobile for when I was driving or not near my music room to get ideas down. After talking to a few people the name Olympus was the one that came up often so after weighing all the options the WS-500M was the one I wanted. I loved the idea of the internally stored USB because I hate cables that I have to worry about not losing. And I wanted something simple, and it had to have stereo mics.

On to the actual review of the product now. After realizing the rechargeable battery was DOA, I didn't feel like waiting for it to charge so I tossed in a good old reliable AAA alkaline battery that I had in the drawer. The device sprang to life quickly, I hit record and said "testing 1-2-3" hit playback and sure enough it was working that fast. I didn't even need to read any instructions at all, it...Read more