Looking for a digital voice recorder that plays MP3s....

[poltr1]

Last week, I saw a digital voice recorder in an arcade game called "Lighthouse". It has a spinning dial, and the object is to rack up 6 points. Well, after $3.00 worth of tokens, I was nowhere near getting the voice recorder. Ah well, it was probably a cheap one anyway (the brand name of the voice recorder was Coby).

And I began thinking.....is there a digital voice recorder out there that plays MP3 files? I don't think the Apple iPod has any voice recording capabilities. If it's there, it's not advertised.


Some initial searching on buy.com came up with two items from Creative Labs: the Zen and the MuVo. The Zen has a built-in hard drive -- not good if I'm klutzy with the device and drop it. And it's expensive -- price is between $200-$250. The MuVo has flash memory (and thus a smaller capacity) -- but it's less expensive than the Zen.

My current frontrunner is the Creative MuVo Micro N200, 512 Mb capacity, black case.

My specs: I'm looking for the ability to record several "tracks" of voice messages (or live music) that I can step through (a la Landware's GoVox, which can record up to 99 racks but has a grand total of 8 minutes for all tracks), a USB 2 or FireWire connection, and the capability to play MP3 files. I prefer flash media to miniature hard drives. Swappable flash media is nice but not necessary.


Any recommendations? Anything I should stay away from?

Comments

[patoadam]

Suggest you check out the iRiver mp3 recorders.

[poltr1]

I looked at the iRiver N10 series. The N10-105 has 512 Mb of flash memory, but it's not cheap ($239.99). That's almost twice as much as the MuVo with the same amount of memory ($119.99).

[supurrkitten.livejournal.com]

the standard I-pod can have a voice recorder adapter. The mini doesn't have the option, much to my dismay