Digital recorders have come a long ways since the earliest versions that required a cassette tape to record the dialogue. That’s right, a cassette tape! For those of us who were born in the ‘70’s or before, we certainly remember the times where all things were played and recorded using these marvelous little tapes. Today however, most sound related electronics are in digital format and the latest in the personal recorder technology is a voice activated digital recorder.
A digital recorder in general is a handheld gadget that allows us to record sounds that are important enough to us that we want to access the sounds at a later time. They are really beneficial for recording class lectures, certain interviews, or just personal sound notes that we might leave for ourselves. When you are ready to record you would just push the record button and pause it or stop it when you are done.
Most of the tape versions didn’t allow for any deviation beyond the normal tape record, pause, stop, and playback. When the tape was empty you would have to insert a new tape, and many times this would mean that you might miss an important part of the lecture while in the process of changing the tape. That is if you even had another tape handy.
What the digital recorders now allow us to do is record for much longer and without having to ever change tapes. This invention proved to be a huge benefit but there were still some drawbacks. The memory still ran out, and when it did there was no way to record more unless you emptied the files that you do have onto a computer, erase something on their, or have another digital recorder there for backup.
As the advancements continued on these recorders, the memory and file space kept expanding as well. The voice activated digital recorder is one of the latest advancements that are designed to turn off and on automatically as they hear the sounds. This takes away the trouble of having to record and pause and pause and record during dead times in the lecture or presentation. Not only that, but you also don’t have to listen to a lot of dead time and silence as you go back and listen to the playback of your recording.
This makes recording much easier and it solves the dilemma of the memory ever running out in one recording session. Since it only records when it actually picks up sound, the recording life is going to be much, much longer.