Olympus WS-510M 4GB Digital Voice Recorder and WMA/MP3 Music Player

I own another Olympus recorder which I bought years ago and I paid a ton of money for it. It was money well spent. I was intimidated by the "digital" part of it for a long, long time, but once you get the hang of it, these are so fabulous.

There's a button on the front that lets you move between folders A-E. That letter will appear on the screen and you can work on 5 different projects easily---just press the little button and it will take you to the folder you want where you can store all your notes for that project.

Within each folder are 199 files---I know this sounds confusing if you are new to the digital world, but the recorder does it all for you. You just go to the folder (tap the far right top button several times and it will go from A to E on the screen. You stop at the letter you want). Then press record and Talk! Easy!

When you are done, you'll see on the screeen 1/1---which means two things: you have just created a file and...Read more

I use my DVR for almost everything; journal, shopping lists, work to-do lists, and personal to-do lists. I decided that I wanted to also have something that I could playback some audio files for customers and potential customers, so I looked into a DVR that could also play MP3 files. I first got the Olympus DS-40 and I was very happy with that one. It had great playback sound, great for dictation, robust, and very easy to use buttons. But as I decided to load some music on it, I found that the memory was way too limited for me (512MB). So, I looked into the same capabilities but with more memory. I swapped it for this one and I have been very happy. The pro's:
Massive memory
Can swap between voice and music; making it truly like 2 devices in one
Lightweight
Embedded USB port
Lighted screen
Noise cancelling for playback (have to use: see con's)
Did I say massive memory?
There is a rechargeable battery, but I can't say if that works...Read more

I love everything about this recorder except that it created corrupt wma files. By corrupt I mean that after I downloaded the file to my pc, when I listened to the file it played fine for a while then the playback would hang in the middle of the recording. I figured out, and a few hours later was instructed by Olympus support, to format the recorder. So far that's fixed the problem. Also, it's in the manual but be sure you realize that if the battery runs out during a recording the file doesn't get closed and you lose that recording. So don't forget to press stop when you're finished recording. One nice surprise is that the battery supplied is a 900mah NIMH AAA which is as far as I know is currently about the highest capacity AAA nimh available.

edit: There is an file copy of the user manual in the recorder's memory that's accessible when it's connected to a pc and is considerably easier to read than the paper copy. If you care anything about it copy it to another...Read more