Olympus VN-120PC
This device presets the notes as a straight file listing. While it is possible to order the note files by date, and the date is set by an internal clock in a similar way to that of RememBird, the presentation a lot denser and harder to make sense of than RememBird's presentation. This makes the whole process of sorting out your notes a chore. RememBird appear to have thought much more about how their product will be used, which is all the more surprising since Olympus have a long history of making voice recorders since 1969[1]
The Olympus software is not particularly a problem where recordings are long, like say lecture or meeting recordings. Hower, birding notes tend to follow a more unusual pattern. They come in a long string of short notes, and this is where RememBird's presentation, where you can annotate the recordings easily as well as deleting and trimming unwanted sections, is far more usable that a dreary long list of short wav files. The amount of time this saves you should not be underestimated, particularly where you may be birding for several days before transcribing the notes!
RememBird stores the notes as MP3s sampled at 22kHz, which gives a more than adequate voice bandwidth of 10kHz. The MP3 coding gives a result which is much easier on my ears that the raspy quality of ADPCM which is typically used for digital voice recorders including the VN-120PC. Both are perfectly adequate for intelligible speech.
The Pearlcorder, announced in 1969 .
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