Olympus DS-30 Digital Voice Recorder

This is my first digital voice recorder. I'm a psychologist and use it for recording therapy sessions. It's great for doing supervision with trainees as well. Simply awesome. I love it!

Recording from classes it is cool, I am very pleased with the device easy to use, many options for sound quality even when I attached my recorder to my DVD car stereo the sound is excellent.

This recorder is so easy I put it to use as soon as the batteries were in. It is so easy and convenient to organize each folder, and the sound is quite amazing for such a little thing. Though I am still learning about all its capabilities, I already love it, and am having a blast recording my childrens' voices, songs and anecdotes. I like that it allows me room to grow, because it's more than I need for recording the family history (my kids can't wait for me start using the MP3 option, and I don't even know what that is yet!). I will use it to capture as much oral history as possible at our family reunion, then make copies for family members... so much easier than the written records I started ten years ago!

I purchased two of these recorders a few months ago for the shared use of my team at work. Every colleague who has used one has come back to me and told me they're impressed.

I didn't go for the more expensive DS-40 model simply because the only real advantage seems to be that it has 500MB of space instead of the 250 offered by the DS-30. While that translates to being able to make recordings twice as long as those made by the DS-30, this is an advantage only if you're recording away from your computer for long periods of more than four hours. But if you work in an office environment in which a computer is readily available for USB transfer of files, you don't need more than 250MB of storage and therefore the DS-30 is an excellent choice.

The best thing about this recorder is its ease of use. The basics are fairly simple: there are five settings for audio quality, which also determine the number of hours you can record before the recorder's memory is full (the higher the quality, the fewer hours and the more space taken up). I always use the highest setting (stereo extra high-quality), which records a little over four hours of audio and records clear, crisp audio. I've always found the lowest setting to sound a bit garbled and therefore I don't use it, but the other settings are more than adequate to moderately adequate. To be honest, I've never really had to record more than four hours of audio yet.

You can also tune the sensitivity of the microphone to tailor it for recordings in very large settings, meeting room settings, or single one-on-one (dictation) situations. And if you're recording in an area with lots of consistent noise (like an air-conditioned room or on an airplane), you can enable a setting that cancels out the low-frequency hum in your recorded audio. It's fun to experiment with these configurations, and makes the recorder a lot more geek-friendly to those who want to be geeky about it.

My favorite aspect of this recorder is the "index mark" feature, which lets you set an index mark at any time within the recorded audio file by pressing a button. You can add up to 16 index marks per file (and the recorder can have an almost unlimited number of audio files). This is extremely helpful when you want to tag particular moments during a conversation, brainstorm, or meeting. And while other reviewers have commented that installing the free software isn't necessary, it's necessary if you want to use the index mark feature. (The index marks aren't readable by your basic audio tools like iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player.)

In general, I would recommend this recorder to any person who wants to make high-quality, inexpensively-produced, relatively short recordings.

I love my DS-30! I'm a college student and use it to record lectures. One of my professors likes to walk around the room (probably fits 50 desks) while she lectures, and I was concerned about what the quality of the recordings would be (I figured I would need to buy a different microphone). They turned out great, the DS-30 was even able to pick up some of the quieter students' comments, so the microphone is great as-is.

Pros:
- Great quality recordings
- Hold feature
- Lecture, Conference and Dictation settings (volume requirements)
- Lots of memory/time
- Good instruction manual
- Doesn't "eat" batteries

Cons:
- No mp3 format for recordings
- No real rewind (you can rewind only 3 seconds per second)