Digital voice recorders, anyone?

So far, my marriage with the Getting Things Done religion philosophy has survived the onslaught of "stuff" that happens in first three weeks of the semester. For the most part, I’ve been able to implement the prime GTD directive: trap all your information flowing in and dump it out of your brain and into an airtight system to organize it. For me, that system is a combination of regular file folders, Kinkless GTD (with the awesome Quicksilver backing me up), iCal, and strategically-labelled Entourage folders.

The weakest link is that I don’t have a way of trapping stuff coming in — whether from an outside source or things I think of on the fly — when I am not able to write it down or send it to kGTD. This afternoon I thought of something I needed to add to my lists while I was walking somewhere and my computer was powering down, and I think of a lot of stuff while I’m in the car. So I’ve been thinking about getting a digital voice recorder so I can capture stuff like that, then either play it back later or — better yet — plug it into my Macbook and transfer the voice notes so I can transcribe them or attach them to files or emails later.

I’m looking for a digital voice recorder that (1) is reasonably small and compact, certainly no larger than, say, an iPod nano; (2) has USB connectivity; (3) stores voice notes in some file format amenable to transfer to and use on a computer; (4) plays nice with Macs; and (5) is as far under $100 as possible. $50 would be nice. And I guess more importantly, I’d like to be able to pick the thing up, hit fewer than 2 buttons, and record a decent-quality voice note in a neglible amount of time and effort. My old Toshiba PDA had voice recording capability, but it was a pretty big device; ande recording involved turning the thing on, finding a tiny button on the side of the device and holding it down for three seconds before it would record, making it difficult  to use while driving, and by the time I’d punched all the right buttons my thought was long gone anyway. 

This Sony model has a good price but doesn’t have the USB/Mac connectivity and got  horrible user reviews on Amazon. This Olympus model is nice but it’s got a lot more features than I need; I’m talking about making quick voice notes, not podcasts.

Any thoughts or experiences?

Tags: Digital voice recorders, GTD