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Olympus DS-30 Digital Recorder ReviewedThe Olympus DS-30 is a lightweight handheld digital recorder. We use this for recording parts of our podcast, and thought it was worth dedicating a page of our site to discussing this recorder, for the benefit of anyone thinking of buying one.
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AvailabilityThe Olympus DS-30 is available from around £90. The online suppliers we've found are: |
This is a nice little recorder. At the top-quality stereo setting, this holds over 6 hours of audio, and we've used this regularly for FrequencyCast, our TV and Tech podcast.

The recorder is pretty robust and flexible. We tend to find that using the built-in mono mic gives us better results than the stereo mic when recording a single voice for our podcast, and for the really high-quality stuff, we've used an external mix plugged in via the 3.5mm socket.
The Olympus DS-30 records in WMA format. for those technically-minded, the audio files are recorded using the wma2 codec. At the highest quality setting, the audio is stereo, with a sampling rate 44100 Hz, 16 bits per sample, bitrate 128 kb/s.
Hard to fault this recorder - it's generally easy to use, powerful and reliable. You can also use it at an MP3 player. One little gimmick is that the thing speaks at you - menu commands and basic functions can be audible as well as visual.
This has only been a quick review - if you'd like to know more, contact us and we'll be happy to answer your question or add to this review.

Here's what's supplied in the Olympus DS-30 box:

Contents of the Podcastudio box
Batteries: A question from Tessie Sciortino. "Could you kindly let me know if there is a way how to detect that you need to change the batteries before starting to record? Let's say that you are going to use the Digital Voice Recorder DS 30 for an hour. How can you have your mind at rest that it is not going to stop recording half way?"
The screen has a three-section battery status display, so you can see when it's running low. There isn't a minutes-and-seconds display of battery life remaining, so we advise that if you want to make sure that the batteries don't run out, you insert a new set of Alkaline batteries before recording. Battery life is quoted at approx 20 hours in XQ quality for alkaline batteries. Alternatively, you can power the DS-30 with an AC mains power adapter.
Got a question? Contact us and we'll try to help
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