Ten... digital voice recorders

There's probably an app for it.High quality can be achieved on iPhone

I would imagine that there is a dictaphone app out there for the iPhone. If not then anything that a dictaphone can do, can be achieved by post-processing the recordings made by the iPhone, i.e. after they have been made, perhaps doing such processing on the phone itself or on a full general purpose computer.

The dictaphone mode works by having an amplitude threshold setting used in dictaphone mode so that recording is triggered only when sound is louder than this. There is also conference mode, which is just usual recording straight including background. Dedicated dictaphones have this feature, but it isn't rocket science and could be achieved in software on a iPhone or in post-processing software.

iPhones can record at high quality i.e. CD / 16bit 44.1KHz, there are some guitar applications comprising of a software part (the app) and a hardware part (an adapter, connected between the phone and the instrument). The thing missing from current iPhones I believe is audio input gain control, so volume control may instead be addressed on said adapter hardware. So it depends on the quality of the audio input into the phone. External mics will always be better than built-in, for example.

Also, I would advise on making stereo recordings of your classes, as this is how you would hear them, and your own ears and aural centres of the brain may then be able to better filter out the wanted voice from the unwanted noise perhaps due to phase differences in the audio arriving in the left and right channels, reflections etc. The so-called cocktail party effect.

I would imagine that there is a dictaphone app out there for the iPhone. If not then anything that a dictaphone can do, can be achieved by post-processing the recordings made by the iPhone, i.e. after they have been made, perhaps doing such processing on the phone itself or on a full general purpose computer.

The dictaphone mode works by having an amplitude threshold setting used in dictaphone mode so that recording is triggered only when sound is louder than this. There is also conference mode, which is just usual recording straight including background. Dedicated dictaphones have this feature, but it isn't rocket science and could be achieved in software on a iPhone or in post-processing software.

iPhones can record at high quality i.e. CD / 16bit 44.1KHz, there are some guitar applications comprising of a software part (the app) and a hardware part (an adapter, connected between the phone and the instrument). The thing missing from current iPhones I believe is audio input gain control, so volume control may instead be addressed on said adapter hardware. So it depends on the quality of the audio input into the phone. External mics will always be better than built-in, for example.

Also, I would advise on making stereo recordings of your classes, as this is how you would hear them, and your own ears and aural centres of the brain may then be able to better filter out the wanted voice from the unwanted noise perhaps due to phase differences in the audio arriving in the left and right channels, reflections etc. The so-called cocktail party effect.

iphone recorder

in reply to earlier poster, the voice recording software that comes with the iphone is surprisingly good!

Absolutely

Philips and Olympus are the two dictation device makes you most frequently see in office situations in my experience, where professionals use these devices for transcription all day every day. Each manufacturer has a whole digital dictation ecosystem with dedicated transcription pedals and server software (including handling DSS files and all the relevant metadata).

Personally I use a Philips DPM 9600 after the better part of two decades using a genuine Dictaphone (the brand, not the generic title) until it finally died. The thumb move for recording's identical, and I'm too lazy to change.

@UltraDisk Voice Recorders

If I may, let me start by thanking you for coming to the Register forum and responding to the review and questions about the UltraDisk voice recorders. However, the whole file system thing sounds a bit confused...NTFS isn't a partition type, it's a file system. In any case, Mac OS X (from 10.2 on up IIRC) does support read only access for NTFS formatted storage devices with any other software being required. Read/write support for FAT32 is defintely present in Mac OS X (and I believe Mac OS 9 as well, but it's been a looong time). If the UltraDisk recorder presents itself to the computer/operating system as a USB mass storage class device, surely it would work fine with a Macintosh (less the software, of course)?

As a Reg Hardware reader who is located in the United States, I'd also like to ask if you have any plan to enter the US market with your products. I do like the small form factor and the convenience it implies.