I went out and bought this little gizmo last night, an Olympus digital voice recorder.
A while back, Mike Sansone suggested that I do podcasting, so I'll do that on occasion, but I also wanted something to better record the music that I create, and this does that fairly cheap. Better than recording on my digital camera and converting the mpeg to mp3, anyway. That process introduced lots of Rice Krispies to the process (snap, crackle, pop, and all that).
And I'll just play with it. The human voice is an amazing instrument, whether it can carry a tune or not. And the world around us is so full of wonderful sounds. We focus a great deal on our vision, but if I had to choose between eyesight or hearing, I'd go with hearing every day of the week. My hands can make up for the loss of vision, and I would not want to go without the sound of the human voice.
The process of recording is easy. And I've incorporated the XSPF player to allow easy playback here on the web site. (You'll probably have to click twice to get the player to play the file...)
Did it work? I'll know in a minute after I post this...
ETC: Yep, it worked, but I discovered that I have to save the MP3 file at a 128 bit rate. The larger the bit rate, the larger the file. For voice, a bit rate of 32 is just fine and lends itself to a smaller file, but when I do that, the track plays 4 times faster so I sound like a chipmunk on helium. I'll have to work with it or find a different player.
MORE ETC: I've created a graphic for this and decided to forego the in-browser player because it can't support smaller files, and I don't want my traffic eaten up here by humungous file downloads. You can click the graphic to listen to Cub beat me in a game of Battleship. I was testing the sound quality of the recorder (good!) and messing around to find the best quality file size (64 bit).
I went out and bought 
