REC 8gb Dictaphone USB Pen Drive Memory Stick Digital Audio Voice Recorder Black 580 Hours

The recorder is very lightweight and slim. It has good range, 30ft at least, and does not have a "static" sound when whatever you're recording isn't making noise. The swan on the front is a beautiful extra detail, but is very minimalist and not gaudy. The buttons are very self-explanatory, and the device is easier to use than other recorders I've had. It does not require batteries or charging. The software installs easily, literally just plug it in like any other USB drive. I would purchase this again if I needed another one, or recommend it to a friend who needed one.

It's hard to get a good idea of the *actual size* of many of the digital voice recorders on amazon; going through the measurements is tedious and only two or three items in the entire category have pictures with human hands not an ideal scale marker, but it gives *some* hint. This one you could at least tell from the USB connector, it really is small enough to toss in a pocket but there's no hole to attach it to something else, like a keyring. An old style "pack of gum" would be a good reference size, but I don't know how common that is today...

Note that it doesn't have a builtin speaker it has a headphone jack, and comes with cheap standard earbuds which are mostly useful for shoving into the plug hole and widening it enough that your *good* earphones will actually fit. (minus half a point for poor mechanical fit, there, but only half because they did work once they'd been shoved in and out a few times.)

I did some test recordings, and it picked up nearby voice perfectly, and other casual voices in the room clearly though quietly.

The .wav files played just fine with mplayer on a linux box; it's perfectly normal in that respect. It also had some extra files: "Settime.rar" and "???? 02.mp3" (some asian pop song that SoundHound couldn't identify.) Harmless in this instance, but sloppy; I'd assume the song was there to QA-test the "play music" feature, but since the earphone plug had clearly never been used, I'm not convinced.

All I can say about the manual is "try google translate next time, it couldn't really be *worse*". I mostly worked out how to use it by accident; the 6 buttons and two switches are clearly labelled, and it has several LEDs in the case that light up in different colors to hint at what it's doing colors which are not mentioned in the manual. The manual *does* suggest that only 99 "files" can be recorded, I haven't tested this, I'm still working on "DOWE: In the state of play or pause, short-press this key can move later"... My main complaint about the buttons is that when plugged into a typical horizontal USB port, the only reasonable place to grab it is the edges that are already entirely covered with buttons. (What I'd *like* to see is one button on the front, long-press to turn on (green), press once to record (goes red) and again to stop (goes green again.) But that's because I primarily want to play back on a computer, not through earbuds...)

Also, out of paranoia, I copied a handful of iso images to the stick, unplugged it, plugged it back in, and verified them; that worked, write speeds in the 5-7MB/sec range. So it's a real enough memory stick.

Buy REC 8gb Dictaphone USB Pen Drive Memory Stick Digital Audio Voice Recorder Black 580 Hours Now

When I received this I gave it a test and it worked fine. When I actually needed it for a very important meeting the POS did not record a thing; and I still cannot get it to record. All I have now is an expensive thumb drive. Stay well clear of this usless thing.

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