Hard disc voice recorder - whats good?

researcher

Time moves on and I need to be able to record interviews and send them over the internet to the transcriber - so bye-bye my old reliable sony tape recorder and royal mail.

I've bought a Sony ICDP320 yesterday because it was on offer at Argos for £33.49 - but before I use it - will it do the job? I want to record individual interviews - maximum in a day would be 4 - and then download everything to my laptop and send them electronically. It needs to be totally reliable and trouble free, as well as being fairly simple. The sound also needs to be clear. I believe the Sony will do all of this, but how well?

Any ideas - I don't want to use this if it's no good - it does seem very cheap - but then things have moved on so much, neither do I want to waste money?

Any other's that you can recommend?

Thanks - I know this might not be the right board, but you guy's and gals seem to know so much.
:beer:

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How long are these interviews? 64mb doesn't seem a lot to play with. Can you attach a microphone? I would have thought that would be vital.

You don't need one with a hard disk - just one that will take good sized flash cards. I have seen ones by Edirol - the R09 for instance and also the M-audio Microtrack but these will cost a lot more as they are for making quality recordings.

researcher

Interviews would be about 1 hour - the sony says it will do 7.5 hours in hq mode - it can have an external mic too

espresso

researcher wrote:

Interviews would be about 1 hour - the sony says it will do 7.5 hours in hq mode - it can have an external mic too

Are you sure that's not the battery life you are quoting? This page gives 440 mins on the highest quality.

Why not try it out?

:eek:

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That makes sense with the quoted sampling rate of 8khz though I would expect that to give very poor sound quality. But then that moght enough for your needs.