USB Connected Voice Recorders

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We plan to use new digital voice recorders. Products are available from Olympus, Sony, and others.  All of these digital voice recorders offer file-based audio storage.  We would like to take advantage of this feature and move the files to our computers.

It is not clear whether there is a difference in the product features described as “USB connection” and “USB direct connection.” Is this difference in USB connectivity a concern for file transfer to CentOS
computers?  Thanks in advance for any information.

2 thoughts on - USB Connected Voice Recorders

  • I have a USB digital audio recorder (hi-fi stereo, not ‘voice’), it records on a 32GB SD card. I import the audio by plugging the SD card into a SD reader on my PC and copying the files directly off it.

    that said, afaik, “USB connection” and “USB Direct Connection” is purely a matter of marketing semantics. hopefully, these voice recorders present a ‘storage device’ interface to the host, so it can just mount them like any other file system, and copy files. if they present a custom device interface which requires a device specific driver, odds are pretty good that driver only exists for Windows and maybe Mac OSX.

  • I have a digital voice recorder. I use it just like a USB memory stick –
    although I haven’t re-formatted it as Ext3, Ext4 etc. I simply connect it to a USB port and download the recordings. The device’s contents can be seen in Nautilus.

    If possible, and it may not be possible, try to get USB3 compatible devices. There is now a USB 3.1 standard yet the markets seem flooded with much old, and much slower, USB2 devices. USB3 is backward compatible with USB2 and USB1.

    USB3 devices have a slightly different USB logo and use blue plastic at the connections to distinguish it from older USB2 devices.

    A device that takes UM3 / AA batteries will record longer than those using smaller capacity AAA / UM4 batteries. Personally I would like a recorder that takes Chinese C123 or 18650 Lithium batteries for significantly extended recording times.