Things That Work

Today I got a digital voice recorder (Sony ICD-B5000). It’s fairly basic as voice recorders go, but I think it will suit my needs, especially since it was under $50. It doesn’t have USB to transfer notes to computer, but since a lot of the USB voice recorders I saw were significantly more expensive, had less record time, and weren’t necessarily compatible with Macs anyway, I decided it wasn’t worth it. If I really want to back up a note off the recorder I can hook its line out to my computer’s line in and just record it with Audacity or something.

I was also considering the Olympus 4100 (not the 4100-PC, since the only difference is about $20 and non-Mac-compatible USB), or one of those things that turns your iPod into a digital recorder by plugging into the dock slot. Those were tempting, as I already carry an 80gb iPod video everywhere I go, but most of the reviews implied they drained the iPod battery super fast, and I also want to be able to easily use the recorder at work (where my iPod is usually already plugged into my computer). So if I wanted to record something, I’d have to unmount the iPod, wait for the “do not disconnect” indicator to go away, unplug it from the USB cable, plug it into the recorder adapter, wait for the iPod to change to record mode, and honestly by then whatever I had wanted to record would probably be gone.

Both the Sony and the Olympus are pretty similar in feature set. I picked it up at Best Buy, so if I decide I want to compare the two before making a final decision, I can easily return/exchange it in the next couple weeks.

There’s a lot of things I plan on using this little recorder for. One is better dream retention. Lately I’ve been having a lot of dreams in which I solve some sticky programming issue that’s been bugging me, except by the time I’m fully awake, the actual solution is gone, and all I can remember is that whatever I came up with was really cool. Hopefully I can train myself to hit the recorder when I’m still half asleep and mumble something useful into it. If nothing else, I’ll find out that my subconscious is full of crap, and my insightful sleepy solutions are actually worthless. At least I’ll know.

Another use, of course, is as a ubiquitous capture system. I can just dump whatever comes to mind into it, and then later process the notes, GTD-style, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting them later. Even easier than pulling out a pen and notebook, I can just ramble into the mic and worry about sorting it out it later.

And then there’s the number one use I have planned, the one that pushed me to finally go buy a recorder in the first place: lately at Grooveshark we’ve been having a lot of discussions of processes and organization, and I find that while talking to/ranting with other people I can easily come up with many ideas, but later on when the time comes to try to explain these ideas in an email I get so caught up in grammar, semantics, and word choice, that my passion (and often my entire point) gets lost in the shuffle. I’m hoping that if I can record these discussions in the heat of the moment, that later on I’ll be better able to distill them into something that is both meaningful and constructive.