Review on 🎙️ Searick 48GB Voice Recorder: 3343 Hour Portable Voice Activated Recorder with MP3 Player, USB Charge, Variable Speed, and Password Protection – Upgraded Mini Digital Tape Recorder for Lectures and Meetings by David Dugas

This is my 5th voice recorder to start with and the only one that has lived up to expectations AND is in the budget range. I really needed something that could play at a slower speed so I could take notes. It actually has that feature and works great. Another great feature is the tiny speaker. I've tried voice recorders ranging from $20 to $400, and they've consistently been rubbish when it comes to playback. You can't hear anything even in a quiet room, so you have to use an external speaker or headphones. The microphone records conversations very clearly. This $30 voice recorder outperformed all others I've tried. It's also a lot smaller than it looks. Very discreet. Nice color screen that others don't have. Great battery life. I have several complaints. I wish the variable playback setting was more accessible. It's currently in a different menu under Sound Settings and not in the same menu where the audio recording is actually playing. This means you have to switch between different menus to move faster/slower and hold down the physical buttons to fast forward or rewind. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a pain when you have a long recording, you have to fast-forward to get to a specific part of the speech, and then just play that specific part in slow motion to take notes make. My other complaint is that because the screen is so small, it's hard to tell which file is which. You can only see the first few letters and numbers of each file, and it takes a while to scroll through the file name. If we could just rename the file, it would be easier to find it later. Finally, the buttons are not intuitive. You will find yourself playing around a lot. There is a record button but no stop button. Logically you would press the recording again to stop or pause, but I think you have to press the back button to stop. Confusing buttons also confuse the menus because you don't know what to press to confirm. I haven't even figured out how to correct the time and date yet, so hopefully getting the files with the correct timestamp would help. Overall, though, I'm very happy and hope that one day they'll send an update to fix these issues.