It used to be that reporters went around with spiral notebooks whose covers flipped up and out of the way, leaving you with a small ruled sheet within which to scribble, as furiously as you could, your interviewee’s rambling, garbled, half-digested monologue. Then, when it was all over, you sat down at your desk and tried to decipher what exactly it was your subject said — or maybe what exactly it was you wrote. (I guess that notebook, ca. 1972 — back when I was a reporter for the old Philippines Herald — was what you’d call today a “handheld.”)
That notebook would be replaced by the tape recorder — first, the cassette recorder (which often required the accessory of a pencil or a ballpoint to unspool that crinkly tape), and then the microcassette recorder, which was smaller and sleeker. Despite their reduced size, you still had to feed these gadgets with lots of tapes and batteries, and anyone over 40 will still remember that godawful moment when, in the middle (or, worse, at the end) of an interview, when you realized that the thing had died on you 30 minutes earlier, just before your subject opened up and shared the most intimate details of her life.
But that was then and this is now, and now is a time for all things digital. As an occasional journalist and a writer of biographies, I do a lot of interviews, often for hours on end. Those interviews have to be transcribed, filed, and preserved for future reference. That’s why — incorrigible geek that I am — I’ve been on the lookout for the perfect digital voice recorder (DVR), one with loads of memory, a battery that could run a tank if it had to, and a way of moving voice files seamlessly onto my computer — all that, and it had to be as pocketable as a pen or a cigarette lighter. (If it could transcribe notes and make coffee, so much the better.)
A few years ago, I thought I had most of that in a tiny Olympus DVR which I bought online for about $70. It was cute as a bug, but its controls were hard to follow, and worse, it couldn’t connect to my Mac (which, to me, is just about the worst thing you can say about any gadget, although Macs in those days had it coming to them; now they’re much better off for connectivity). I soon traded that thing off (curiously enough, for that most analog of recorders — a vintage 1920s Parker fountain pen).
Its replacement was no bigger than my phone — in fact, it was my phone, a Treo 650 with a 2-gigabyte Secure Digital memory card. Using a bit of shareware, I turned that phone into a DVR, a task it performed pretty well, despite the oddness of placing your phone close to another person. Alas, even digital doohickeys suffer micro- or nano-seizures of one kind or another, and it would happen that I would be interviewing a retired CEO over six straight hours (keeping the phone tethered to a power line), only to discover that my SD card had failed me. There was absolutely nothing on it; it had gone corrupt and couldn’t be saved. I spent the next few days furiously recalling what had been said, and set up a few more meetings with my client to ask him the same questions with as much casualness as I could muster, unable and unwilling to confess to my digital catastrophe.
That led me to my next DVR solution; since I couldn’t trust SD cards any longer, I opted for my iPod (the big, old-fashioned white brick), which could be transformed into a voice recorder with the addition of a Griffin iTalk — a contraption that sat on top of the iPod and which acted as a mike and playback speaker. I bought a used, cheap iPod just for this purpose, so I wouldn’t have to depend on it for music and so I could toss it around in my bag and backpack without worrying about scratches and all those cosmetic issues geeks fuss over. It wasn’t the most elegant of solutions, but it was clever, and the iPod’s huge capacity meant that you were limited only by your battery life, as you could record hundreds of hours of high-quality material on the iPod/iTalk combo if you wanted to. (The Belkin Voice Recorder offered a similar function, and both were priced in the $30-40 range.) As a DVR, the device worked brilliantly; the iTalk’s pickup was exceptionally strong, and syncing the iPod to my Mac was a no-brainer (iTunes recognizes and downloads the recordings automatically and saves them as “voice memos”).
I was pleased enough with that setup, but I wanted something even neater, especially since the iPod/iTalk combo was making an embarrassing bulge in my pants pocket. I looked around and thought for a long while about the (now-discontinued) Olympus DS-330, which seemed to have everything I was looking for, but its $200 tag put me off.
And then, in a stroke of serendipity, I was wandering around Heathrow’s duty-free a few months ago with my last 30 UK pounds burning a hole in my pocket. There, at Dixons, was a Sony Walkman MP3 player (NWD-B105) the size of a lipstick, with 2 gigs of memory and a USB connector, selling for £29.80. It was meant to store and play music, but it could also record voice. Could this thing actually work with my Mac, and work well as a DVR?
The joyful answer is yes. The controls take just a few minutes to get used to; it has great pickup, weighs about a third of my iPod, and is built like it’s meant to ride on a Humvee. I slip the business end into the USB port of my MacBook Air, then drag and drop the voice files over to my desktop (where I’ve created a shortcut to the directories on the Walkman), and they’re saved as MP3s, readable by iTunes. The only strange thing is, I don’t even know how music sounds on this gadget — I’m using it solely as a DVR, and I suggest you do, too, if you’ve been looking for your own voice recording solution.
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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.