Digital voice recorder that is Mac compatible

[swingerofbirch]

I'm looking for a digital voice recorder and am pretty overwhelmed. Unlike iPods, digital voice recorders have long model names and don't seem to be Mac compatible.

What I'm looking for:
long recording time/battery life
used for close up dictation
sound quality doesn't have to be excellent
records to compressed format to take up less room on computer (not wav, aiff)

I've been looking at Olympus ones which say they are not Mac compatible. But would it still show up as USB disk image I could manually transfer the audio recordings from? Or is it really, truly not Mac compatible for some odd reason? If it's just that I can use the Olympus software and some other Mac program can open it that's fine.

 

[r.j.s]

I have an olympus ws-100 that works with my Mac, it records in WMA, but for playback of interviews that works just fine.

It just shows up like any other removable drive.

 

[swingerofbirch]

Thanks for the advice.

The world of voice recorders is much more confusing than the world of iPods. And my decision was more frustrating in that I have a first gen iPod touch and now the new ones have voice recording.

I ended up going with a Sony--and I realize it looks like Olympus is the bigger, better player in this field, but I was attracted to the Sony for its direct to MP3 recording over Olympus's models which seem to use WMA, which I know I can use on a Mac, but just didn't really want to.

I don't know if I made the right choice, but we'll see. None of them seemed to use rechargeable batteries, I'll have to buy one for this.

It plays back MP3s which is redundant as I have a touch, but the benefit over the touch is not having to speak into the Apple headphones to record.

Here it is:

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-ICDUX80-Recorder-Recording-Playback/dp/B00142U4YA