Review on Olympus VN-541PC Black Voice Recorder with 4GB Memory, PC Link, One-touch Recording by Seth Torres

The Olympus VN-541PC is small and light and does exactly what I need. It records my voice for notes without distracting me from driving. I can easily reach for it, find it, find the REC button and slide it to the ON position, and in about 1.5 seconds it's all recorded. It notifies you with a soft beep. I don't have to take my eyes off the road for a moment. It's also easy to work in total darkness, for example when I wake up in the middle of the night and need to write down a thought or dream. I have 2 of these, one for the house and one for the car. My recording is in WMA format. I wanted a companion model that would record MP3s, but nobody had one available when I went shopping. The difference is small as both formats are common and easy to hear on a computer. The WMA block has 4 recording settings for extremely long events with VERY compressed and ugly audio; a memo to take notes for yourself when the microphone can be held close to the mouth; For example, speak to record an interview and the highest setting reduces to just 20 kbps IIRC. I would use this to record a lecture. I don't think I would use this device for serious music recording, but that was not my intention, nor should it be. I have the best machines for that. I haven't run out of battery yet, but the specs make me think it's excellent. I assume the MP3 model will work the same way. My only reservation about Olympus audio recorders in the past is that they can be short lived as was the case with mine (forget the model) which was a much more expensive device and I actually used it to record music. He had a problem with his SD card reader. I sent it in for warranty service and got it back soon after, but the same problem reappeared after the warranty expired. So I just used it as a player until it completely failed. These newer machines don't have a map, they only have internal memory. I hope they don't have a similar problem, but for only $40 it's not such a disaster if they fail. Files can be transferred to a computer using a standard USC cable.