Obsessive consumerism

I’m definitely in an obsessive phase. Sometimes I bite my fingernails all day, sometimes I research something online until my eyes fall out, sometimes I comparison-shop for something I’ve decided I just can’t live without. Today, I’m doing all three (well, plus some others).

I’ve decided that I Really Need a digital voice recorder that’ll save voice notes to .wmv or .wav files that I can then upload to my laptop. Ideally, I can then buy software for my Mac that’ll convert those sound files to text files. That way, I can take notes on road conditions, scenery, random thoughts, etc while riding, and they’ll end up as text files with little to no effort on my part (i.e. I won’t have to listen to the recordings and type it all out). The unfortunate part to all of this is that there seems to be only one DVR that promises Macintosh compatibility (the Olympus DS-330), and the only software that’ll do the speech-to-text conversion on the Mac is iListen, which has far more functionality than I’d ever use.

Sounds like a tax write-off opportunity to me. I’m pretty sure I can sell a couple hundred bucks worth of freelance articles in 2004. *crosses fingers*

Does anyone have any experience with the DS-330, or some sort of similar DVR? Pros? Cons? I’ve been using an Olympus VN-1800, which is great, but it doesn’t save the recordings to computer-readable files. I’m too restless to sit and listen to my notes again and type them all out.

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