Olympus - Digital Voice Recorder VN-3100 Review

I don't exactly understand the electronics behind why this doesn't work. I find myself in need of recording phone conversations when I do interviews with celebrities. I started out writing notes by hand during the phone conversations and moved to typing it out, both of which make it hard to concentrate on the conversation. I want my iPhone to do this, but it won't, even with the new Voice Memos feature. That pauses your phone conversation while you record. Maybe it's more a legal issue than an electronic issue. I resorted to using a small handheld digital voice recorder, an Olympus VN-3100, which does the job without bells and whistles.

This Olympus digital recorder is just the right size for being handheld, fitting perfectly. To get the clearest recording possible, I put my phone on speaker, and butt the microphone end of the recorder up to the speaker end of my phone. And this allows me to hold both at the same time comfortably, although I admit it does seem somewhat archaic in this day and age. The record and stop buttons are easy to find, making this part of the process a breeze.

A great feature is that it records up to seventy-one hours and forty minutes of audio. It also has a hierarchal sytem of folders to organize your recordings. There are four folders, A, B, C, and D, and you can record multiple sessions in each folder. The hard part becomes remembering where you recorded your different sessions, as they're named only by date.

Where this voice recorder seems a little cumbersome is in playback, making me exasperated enough to groan out loud. The forward and reverse button is quite touchy. If you just touch it quickly, it plays, and quickly again it forwards to the end of the recording. When transcribing, and pausing in between sections of speech, if I accidentally hit play twice, I lose my place and have to go back to the beginning and forward to that spot. Likewise, if I try to forward to a desired spot and let up on the button too soon, then try to resume, I'm back at the end of the recording.

However, it does the job. Whatever I put up with during the cumbersome playback is better than writing it out by hand or typing along during the conversation. In addition, it was relatively cheap, under $50. For it to do the basic job of what I need for that price, it's worth it.