Note To Self
I'm currently in the market for for of those digital voice recorders. Partially to act out my CSI forensic pathologist fantasies, but mostly because I'm just not very good at writing things down (and, naturally, very good at forgetting them).
But, as usual, I have my own specific criteria for buying tech items.
Firstly, it has to support USB for dumping the audio files to PC. And it has to use the "Mass Storage" class so that it can be mounted as if it was a disk on any USB supporting system, without the need for additional driver software. That way I can easily and quickly archive the files, upload them to webservers, or perhaps email my memoirs to an online transcription company.
(I've been burned on this before - I bought one of those early USB disk-as-keyfob things. At the time I didn't realise that it used its own protocol. So as a result you had to carry a fricking 3.5in driver floppy around with you if you actually wanted to use it on another PC. D'oh.)
The second requirement is that it encodes files in a "common" codec. It's voice, so it doesn't have to be fantastic quality, just as long as there are open source codec implementations out there. Obviously the Speex codec (basically the Ogg Vorbis of speech) would be ideal for me, but anything supported by SoX would be fine.
But apparently it's not that easy. It seems that most devices only record in proprietary formats.
Olympus devices use DSS (an IVA standard, apparently) and apparently so do devices made by Philips and Dictaphone. I couldn't seem to find an open source implementation of this codec.
Sony devices seem to produce .dvf and .msv files - both of which are encoded in Sony's proprietary LPEC codec. Which, of course, has no open source implementation. (although it appears some devices can record .msv files in the generic ADPCM codec - more investigation needed.)
Sanyo devices use their own codec LD-ADPCM. There doesn't seem to be much information on this online, so it's not clear how much it deviates from ADPCM, but I'm just going to guess it isn't going to be usable with anything Linux.
Is there anyone out there who can provide some recommendation for a personal memo device that's usable with Linux? (Short of suggesting I buy some kind of PDA with a microphone).
Unclassified: posted at 02:32, link