Olympus DS-2 Digital Voice Recorder

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0/5      Total Reviews: 55

Rating: 3
Some great, some poor things

I use this for recording voice dictation for medical reports. It works with my mac but here are a few things I wish I knew earlier. Read those other reviews for technical details.

Rating: 5
Better than expected - excellent recorder

I read lots of reviews and finally bought a DS-2 for mobile sound recording. Man am I impressed. The sound quality is amazing for such a small and inexpensive product. No need for me to repeat all the features everyone else has mentioned. I will mention the following:

Rating: 1
Poor Macintosh Support

I bought this item after seeing the almost uniformly good reviews including the one that says there is good Macintosh support. Unfortunately the player does not work well with the Macintosh. The included software often crashes and does not seem to be able to import DSS files. The software can move the files between the recorder and the computer but the files do not appear in the software window. The use interface is also fairly crude and looks as if it was ported directly from Windows 3.1. The DS-2 appears to the finder as a standard USB disk and I have been able to copy the DSS files from the player to the compuer using the finder. It is then possible to play the DSS files by double clicking them, but it will only play one file. If you want to play another file it is necessary to completely quit the DSS player and relanch it. Exporting the files to a format usable by other software such as AIFF is also nearly impossible. There is an export function in the menu, when it is selected it asks were the new file should be saved but no file ever appears. Unfortunately there is no other Macintosh software available to read or convert DSS files as Olympus refuses to allow others use the the format on the Macintosh. Search of the internet reveals that others have found extremely painful ways of converting the DSS files such as playing the entire file and re-recording it with another program.

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