Olympus WS-331M Digital Voice Recorder and WMA Music Player

i host a radio bicycling show, and travel to--and participate in--bicycle races year 'round, and need an audio recording device that will allow me to capture, with NPR quality, both conversations and ambient sounds to recreate the atmosphere of the event or the person which is the subject of the recording.
this little wonder does it all.
i'm relatively new to the radio business, but with my olympus ws-331m and acessories, i come across like a seasoned professional. with its 2GB flash drive of memory and storage, it is touted to have up to 550+ hours of mono capacity. with my stereo microphone, the "lowest" quality setting provides 72 hours of recording memory in a quality high-enough for our state-of-the-art station's studio. i can't say enough about this little thing. and it's the size of maybe three cigarettes.
AMAZING!
i also bought the telephone conversation recording microphone set-up, and with the stereo earplugs as monitors and non-olympus microphone, i have a recording studio in a pouch. it has worked well in all the conditions i've encountered thus far, although the little built-in stereo microphones had trouble with the 50+ mph winds at a late-october cyclocross race [the hand-held microphone with noise filter took care of that]. i look forward to using it at the national championships in mid-december; i'm certain it will stand up to the certain arctic condtions that historically prevail.
i pity the fool who gets something OTHER than this olympus ws-331m.

I bought the Digital recorder after a lot of research and I am hugely satisfied with this product. It is sleek, extremely light weight and the recording quality is very good.

This item was highly recommended by a friend that had made this purchase. It has lived up to everything they said. I'm very pleased.

This recorder/player works well for me. I use it in four ways:
1. Record notes and memos to myself for later action.
2. Record meetings for later transcription into personal records or official minutes.
3. Record narrations of presentations while practicing. Those narrations are then played into Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred to be turned into typed text. I then clean up the text into a better script and paste it into the Notes area of each slide.
4. Play music when I am not working.

This product works well for me, provided I remember to switch between dictation mode and conference mode as required. A very good value for the money. My next steps will be to purchase a couple of the accessory microphones to see how much improvement they make. (That will be because "I want to" NOT because "I need to".

At over $100, I thought the recorder would have performed just a little better--clarity and volume of playback was not what I was expecting. However, when I played it back through a good set of headphones, the sound was much improved. Still, a useful tool.