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 available for the first months you use this, or memorize the manual, or, you will not be able to use most of the features. (Unfortunately, this seems normal for most digital personal devices nowadays (except for some Apple products)).

The arcane menu arrangement does not lend itself to quick and easy use of the unit if there are constant changes to your recording requirements. For example, as far as I can figure out from the arcane manual you must press two separate buttons, a total of five times in order to something really simple like erase a recording. I erase more recordings than I keep and this is a real time vampire.

Other than that the plusses are that it supports Vista 64 bit, and, contains all of the features of the WS-400. The unit is easy to snap record conversations and other items. One feature I really like is that it comes with its own, easily replaceable, NiMH battery. If you keep this unit plugged into your USB port, it will repeatedly charge the battery. (It is a REAL advantage that it doesn't need its own docking station to charge, or, new batteries every few hours of use).

It is a good buy at the price and easier to use, with all of the features, even with its drawbacks, than any of the other small personal recorders I've looked at over the years by other manufacturers.

Specifications:

Recording Format: WMA

Input level: -70dBv

Maximum working output: 60mW (8 ohm speaker)

NAND FLASH memory 2GB this unit works excellently as a flash drive with VISTA 64 or 32.

MIC Jack: 3.5mm mini-jack; impedance 2k ohms

EAR jack: 3.5mm mini-jack; impedance 8 ohms or more

RECORDING TIMES:

STXQ mode 34 h 30 min.

STHQ mode 69 h 40 min.

STSP mode 139 h 25 min.

HQ mode 139 h 25 min.

SP mode 247 h 10 min.

LP mode 544 h. 55 min.

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 ever needed to use the directions for was how to charge it (hold the stop button as you plug it into the computer, otherwise it just opens files and doesn't charge). I like that it can just plug into the computer with the switch on the side but they also give you a cable incase you're using a desktop (sometimes USB's aren't in the best places).

Anyway, the only thing I would mention to someone buying this is that the speaker doesn't represent the quality of the recording. I mean look at it. It's about 1.5 inches in diameter... if even. Plug it into your computer/headphones/or speakers and you can tell the difference immediately. I like that I could rename files on my computer and then it stayed like that on the device because it records things as numbers with dates and times. Oh, and I really haven't used it for this, but there is a way to use the device for playing MP3's which is pretty nifty. Not really necessary if you have an iPod and it isn't going to replace your iPod anytime soon, but cool nonetheless.

Hope that helps!

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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 was pretty much that simple. I played around with the settings and creating index marks and various other things. Operation is very much intuitive if you've ever worked with any old fashioned tape recorder.

The interface between the WS-500M and my Windows XP/SP3 laptop was flawless. It was totally plug&play, no software required. I could drag&drop any files back and forth. You can even rename a file and the name changes right on the device too. So you can do away with the random file names the device creates.

Recording quality is very good. On the highest quality setting, with the mic set to high sensitivity this little device picks up every sound in stereo that your guitar or voice is making from pretty far away. You can adjust them down and get different acoustics in the recordings giving you some flexibility. For the money this device records very high quality. Even by today's digital music standards. The bad thing is that it won't hide your mistakes and pick scrapes like analog recordings will.

2GB of storage is more than enough for me. I will never fill that up before I get to my laptop to off-load anyway. The MP3 player is a nice little feature, although I won't use it much as a true MP3 player, I have a Sansa for that. It will be nice to have the ability to upload my own songs as MP3 though so people can have a listen. The playback quality of the WS-500 is very good. MP3s and WMA both sound very clear.

I probably won't use the recharge feature much either, it tends to take so long to charge anything through a USB port to being with. I will either just keep using alkaline, or buy a lithium AAA for now until I can get a AAA recharge station. If you do use a non-rechargeable battery make sure you don't use the charge feature when you plug it into your USB. That would be bad.

The physical interface is good. The device is small, so too are the buttons. But the main buttons are big enough to find by feel. REC and STOP are both sized well enough. The screen is not huge, but you can read everything easy. Some people might like a more fancy screen with colors and pictures...well you won't get that here. Its old school black-on-gray "Etch-a-sketch" all the way. But that is fine by me. I didn't buy it for a pretty interface.

All in all, if you are looking for a high quality device at a fair price to record music this one is a great option. The WS-500M is small, portable, and easy to use.

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I've had this recorder for about 10 days and have used it for both voice recordings, playback of voice and playback of music files and an audiobook. I've also used the USB recharging feature, copied audiobook & music files to the "Music" folder from my Dell laptop USB port running Vista Home Premium (64 bit). The unit is small, and easily fits in a pocket. Overall, I've found the WS-500M (silver) recorder to be excellent! I'm very pleased with it.

Reason I bought it:

I'm a self-employed writer and wanted to record story ideas, meetings, interviews, etc.. Plus for other meetings where I wanted a record of what was said, saving me from writing everything down. I had been using an HP iPAQ PDA (hx2495b) Pocket PC with built-in voice recorder. But over the years I've had trouble with Windows Mobile 5 hanging before going into a meeting (slow, doggy OS). When it worked it was fine, but then it recorded to main memory and when that ran out, the recording stopped of course. So I bought the right tool for the job.

Other reviews:

I read the reviews on here & elsewhere before buying it and it is highly rated. One person mentioned the 30 page manual as being long, but that includes the instructions in four languages (i.e. EN, FR, ES, PT) with the English (EN) section being 11 pages. There is a foldout section with diagrams the instructions refer to.

Another compliant I've seen is the hard to use menu, I disagree with that, the menus are easy to use. I have computer background though, so electronic devices come easy to me. I do have some experience with using the Olympus WS-210S (256 MB) recorder, and this unit is nicer. When I first used the WS-210S the menu took some getting used to, but I think the WS-500M has improved the menu. The WS-210S is used at our church, where it is plugged into the sound system's mixer (via patch cable to the MIC jack on the unit) and we record the priest's homily. Our priest has a wireless microphone. We then convert the WMA format to MP3 (free utility: "Efficient WMA MP3 Converter"), edit out unwanted audio (start/end) with the free "Audacity" software & export as MP3, then upload to our parish website as a podcast. The WS-210S only records in WMA format, while the WS-500M can record in WMA or MP3*. (* You need to download the free firmware upgrade from the Olympus site to record in MP3.) Nice added feature!

The backlight feature is nice. The USB recharging feature allows you to recharge the included AAA NiMH rechargeable battery by plugging into a USB port on your computer. Pressing & plugging into the USB port only allows charging, so you can't transfer files & recharge at the same time. I don't see this as a drawback. The recharging feature was important to me. Alkalines are costly & end up in the landfill, unless you can recycle them.

There is a switch that allows you to use it in either Voice or Music modes. "Voice" allows you to select the five different folders (A-E), record/playback audio, etc.. "Music" mode allows access to the "Music" folder (where you can copy music or other audio files (i.e. audiobooks) to it from your computer). You can copy whole folders into the "Music" folder from your computer to group music, audiobooks separately. There are no playlists, so you would have to name the tracks in a sequential format to play in that order. If you want an MP3 player, you should look for that first. The primary purpose of this unit is a voice recorder, so the added feature of playing MP3/WMA's is nice, but it lacks features (i.e. playlists) found in MP3 players.

The sound through the speaker is adequate, but as others have noted, it sounds much better (CD quality) through the included ear-buds (or your own pair). You can also plug external speakers into the headphone jack, or with a patch cable into your car stereo (if it has an input AUX type jack). If you set the voice recording to the lowest quality though, I don't know how that will sound. So if your recording live music somewhere, set the recording quality in the menu to the highest.

Someone said the recorder will pickup table noise when placed on a table for a meeting. I would suggest placing the recorder on a book or stack of papers.

Someone said there is no ON/OFF switch, actually there is and it's the "HOLD" switch. It's oddly named, but in the HOLD position it's OFF, while sliding it the other way is ON. It has a nice feature of turning off after a couple minutes of non-use (i.e. not recording, not playing back or pressing buttons).

There is a light on the front & back that shows when it's recording or charging. When recharging is done, the light turns off. You can get more tech. spec's at the Olympus site, don't buy it there as it's list price ($100).

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This is the 4th digital recorder I have purchased and it is not bad but not the best one I have purchased. The sound pick up is not as good as the WS 100. I have used both at the same time and it is harder to hear on this one than the older one. I like the buttons being on the front and the display being bigger but when it comes down to it the purpose of a recorder is to record what is being said and this is a weakness in my opinion.