Here’s how to pick. Amazon Alexa vs. Google Assistant: Which Voice Assistant Is Best for You? Soniclear recorder provides a clear voice quality of even the softest voice around the room. The UX560 is also the slimmest recorder we tested—at 0.43 inch thick it can easily fit in a shirt or pants pocket. The recorder is also the easiest to navigate, with an intuitive toggle menu to access settings and recordings. At just 4 inches tall, 1.5 inches wide, and 0.44 inch thick, the UX560 is the slimmest recorder we tested. The PX333 also records only in mono, compared with stereo for the PX470. If you do a lot of transcribing, this is a particularly useful device, as it includes 16 levels to adjust play speed and functions to jump quickly to a particular point you’d like to replay. This voice recorder may look basic but it’s anything but. Its small size fits neatly... 2. Other free apps, like Easy Voice Recorder, require several taps to get to the appropriate menu. But it lacks a USB plug (it requires a USB dongle to connect to your computer), making it less convenient for file upload and storage, and has the fewest recording options of the stand-alone recorders we tested. Great separation of background noise from foreground. Ezvid is a free meeting recording software for Windows. The Olympus has one of the largest screens of the models tested, larger than that of our main pick. This recorder also includes a USB connection which allows you to plug the device directly into your computer to download files. We experienced some glitches while testing the $4 Easy Voice Recorder on Android. The two read a Seinfeld dialogue, with the mics facing toward the “interviewee,” or main speaker, to mimic an interview. Its microphones are incredibly sensitive, but in the field this model picked up a lot of background noise. Our office recordings received the highest ratings from our listening panel, and only Hi-Q Pro (our upgrade pick, below) had higher overall recording ratings from our panel. You can browse files and folders on the same page. One panel participant said that audio recorded in the coffee shop was “very clear, the background noises were pleasantly balanced with the foreground, and I felt like actual voices had a pleasing quality to them.” In the lecture setting, listeners commented that while the recording picked up background noise, the lecturer was still understandable. Olympus’ “True Stereo Mic” uses two microphones positioned at a 90 degree angle to deliver an authentic stereo experience. Voice Recorder for iOS is free and has a wide range of file formats, but comes with ads and has the clunkiest design of all the iOS apps we tested. The Philips DVT2510/00 Voice Tracer is an entry-level model that offers fewer features than the competition. But the bill … For supported versions, you can synchronize Dragon Anywhere with your desktop and do voice work on your computer as well. Otherwise this was a pleasant if somewhat filtered recording.” The panel picked the Philips DVT2510 in the lecture recordings, but just by half a point (on a scale of one to three, with three being the highest score), and listeners said that the lecturer still sounded clear on the UX560’s recording. Some can be awkward to figure out, especially when looking for additional features. It allows up to 72 hours of WAV recording, or 1,000 hours of MP3, which is more than enough for most purposes. If you need to record in a pinch, it’ll work well. Ezvid. These days, the audio quality and functionality that you can get from a recorder costing $100 or less is more than good enough to earn it a place in your kit if you record vocal audio fairly frequently and care even a little about sound quality. The Parrot app for Android has the best range of recording options and the cleanest interface of the free Android apps we tested. These can be tricky depending on your computer software, however, which don’t always recognize the folder right away. You should also be able to skip ahead or skip backwards in small increments in case you need to repeat a section or find a particular moment. It recorded the most intelligible audio of all the recorders we tested and offers the most useful collection of features: It’s rechargeable via USB; it has a legible, backlit screen; and its menu system is the easiest to navigate. Navigating the menus is also more difficult than on our top pick. While playing back audio, the WS853 can compensate somewhat for problems you might have run into while recording: a noise-cancellation setting can reduce overall background hiss (though this comes at the expense of battery life), while a voice balancer setting can even out recordings that were made with the mic sensitivity set too low or high by compressing the overall level for a more even sound (though you might run into increased noise). Choose from a “noise cut” filter (which rolls off both low and high frequency sounds) or a low-cut filter to reduce boomy lower frequencies and rumbly sounds alone. Put Amazon's Alexa to work for you with these great smart-home devices. If you want the most granular control of recording format, sample rate and bit rate to optimize for file size, audio quality, or even just to use open-source formats like OGG or FLAC, it’s the app for you. When I started my career and acquired my habits, there wasn’t an alternative. She also consulted with Wirecutter writer Lauren Dragan, who has a degree in audio production and vocal performance, heads our headphone coverage, and has designed audio-quality and appraisal-testing procedures for our site; Lauren helped Anna design a listening panel to assess the audio quality of the recorders we tested. Wirecutter staff writer Anna Perling has been using our top pick, the Sony UX560, to record interviews over the past year. Scene selection presets let you optimize EQ and microphone sensitivity settings for lectures, meetings, interviews, voice notes, and loud and soft music scenarios. 99 A covered but easily accessible microSD slot allows for 32 GB more of storage space if you need more recording hours. Zoom H1n Handy Portable Digital Recorder Bundle. Wirecutter colleagues agreed that $100 is the maximum amount that most people should spend on an audio recorder. Our research shows that a meeting … There are features which helps you to turn the recording off and on during sensitive … Oddly, you won’t be able to use the A-B Repeat to replay the same section repeatedly in transcription mode. The Olympus boasts 110 hours of battery life when recording in MP3 at 128 Kbps, or about four times as long as our main pick. The Olympus’s 8 GB of storage is double that of most of the models we considered, including the UX560, and you can expand it even further with a microSD card. For example, you can access mic source and effects by tapping the on-screen Settings button once. The Sony UX560 is an easy-to-use recorder that provides crisp, clear audio in the most-common recording situations. It’s intuitive to use out of the box: Pressing the home button leads you to a simple toggle menu where you can record, fine-tune settings, and listen to music (that can be uploaded to the device from a computer) or recordings. 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