LS-3 - Latest PCM Music Recorder From Olympus Australia

With the discontinue of the LS-10 and LS-11 digital PCM music recorders earlier in 2011 there was an obvious gap in the Olympus Australia digital recorder range for music lovers.

That gap has now been fully filled by the awesome new Olympus LS-3 digital PCM music recorder. Just released into Australia the LS-3 comes with a couple of very cool new features.

First of which is the Tresmic microphone system. Secreted below the mic grills of the LS-3 are three seperate mics. The center mic is omnidirectional which enhances lower frequencies. Then two mics sits either side of the center mic which are high-performance directional mics. The center mic can be turned on or off, adjusting the frequency response.

The second very neat feature is a pre-record function. This is very clever, how many times have you gone to record something and not quite hit the record button in time? With pre-record on the LS-3 keeps a two second buffer of audio, as soon as you hit record the previous two seconds are then added to the recording making sure you never miss that moment again.

Complete with 4Gb of on board memory and a microSD expansion slot the LS-3 is available from Dictate Australia and has an RRP of $299 incl. GST

Express Scribe Now .ds2 Compatible

As of version 5.30 Express Scribe (Windows) can now load and play DSS Pro audio files, better known as .ds2 files, from both Olympus and Philips recorders.

A point of great angst for nearly two years now with the fleet of transcriptionists worldwide who dedicate their lives to audio typing using Express Scribe, the handy free software from NCH that will play just about every audio format known to man has finally overcome its greatest hurdle, the .ds2 file.

Prior to this update typists who received a .ds2 audio file had a few options:

• Ask the sender to convert to .dss or other compatible format
• Upgrade their own transcription software to a paid Olympus kit
• Buy software to convert the audio for them

So what are you waiting for, head over to http://www.nch.com.au/scribe and get the latest version and become .ds2 compatible. (Not yet Mac, just the Windows people).

Olypmus LS-20M Coming To Australia Any Day Now

One device we have had our eye on for some months now is the Olympus LS-20M which has been hugely popular over in the US. Why are we getting excited about this unit? Well it marks the start of a cross over between Olympus Imaging and their impressive camera knowledge and Olympus Voice with their just as impressive voice recording skills.

Squish the two together and you come up with the LS-20M, HD 1080p video mixed with PCM audio and you are onto a winner.
Olympus Imaging quietly snuck this into the latest Australian Olympus reseller price list released this morning (18th August 2011) maybe thinking nobody would notice. Perfect timing too with Father Day coming, Christmas on the horizon and on a personal note my birthday next week !
The Olympus LS-20M has an RRP of $449 incl. GST in Australia.

Dropbox - The Easy Free Way To Transfer Large Audio Files

Audio files, especially from the non professional high quality digital notetakers, are very large in size, too large to email. This is not a bad thing, the audio they are recording is after all very high quality, especially if you are using a PCM recorder generating uncompressed WAV files. So how do you easily get these audio files to colleagues or to an outsourced transcription service? The answer, Dropbox.

Dropbox has been around for a couple of years and has redefined the way we share and backup files. Dropbox uses a mix of both local storage (a directory or folder on your Mac or PC) and cloud storage, syncing whatever you drop in your Dropbox folder with the cloud.

Certain folders or even files can be shared with others making it an ideal tool for sharing your large audio files with select people. head over to our main blog to read more ... oh yeah, Dropbox is FREE for 2Gb of cloud storage.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - Not Friendly With MacSpeech Scribe

Since the flurry of new releases in the last week from both Apple, with OS X 10.7 Lion and Nuance with Dragon Dictate 2.5, we have had a few phone calls and emails asking about some of the older MacSpeech products.

Not so much MacSpeech Dictate as most users seem to have upgraded to the Nuance offering of 2.0 but many are still using MacSpeech Scribe. Like most Apple users they are keen to get their hands on the latest and greatest anything from Apple.

Unfortunatly, in an update on the Nuance for Mac wesbite, the news is out that MacSpeech Scribe is not supported in OS X 10.7 Lion and users of this product will need to stay on 10.6 Snow Leopard if they want to continue using MacSpeech Scribe.

MacSpeech Scribe takes only recorded audio from a digital voice recorder and transcribes voice to text rather than speaking directly to your Mac.

Dragon Dictate for Mac - Free Update To 2.5 - Use iPhone As Remote Mic

Nuance have been busy this week, first an update for the Windows crowd and yesterday a bump for the Mac crowd. If you are a registered user of Dragon Dictate 2.0 you will receive a free update to version 2.5 via check for updates.

Go grab the free Dragon Remote Mic from the iTunes app store and give your iPhone a go as a remote mic, its very cool and only takes the usual 5 minutes to voice train.

Also new in this release:

• Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac support
• Social media updates to Twitter and Facebook via voice command

Its Here Australia - Dragon NaturallySpeaking Free Upgrade to 11.5

Finally, today I received a popup on my desktop to let me know that my free upgrade from Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 to 11.5 is now available for download, you can imagine the excitement (if you can't picture an old bloke, standing, punching the air going "whoop whoop").

Here's a tip, if you have more than one Dragon NaturallySpeaking to upgrade choose the download option, its a near 500mb file so will save you time and bandwidth.

If you are a Premium or Professional user, while you are waiting for the upgrade to download head over to your local iTunes store and grab the Nuance Dragon Remote Mic app for your iPhone, I think we are all going to love using our iPhone's to dictate wirelessly.