Nearly three months I wrote with great excitement about how I had found an inexpensive (less than $30) digital voice recorder that would allow me to transfer my recordings to my laptop via USB. The RCA VR5220 has a retractable USB connector and acts as a flash drive while also opening RCA's file management software.
That is, as long as the computer recognizes the recorder when you plug it into the USB port. Today my computer stopped doing just that.
. I have run into retractable flash drives before and found them to be unreliable at best.
All is not lost, however. I can still record and then plug into my stereo using the recorder's headphone jack. But I can't offload the sound files so at some point I have to delete to make room for new ones. And using the recorder as a playback device will eat batteries like nobody's business.
I guess you get what you pay for. There are more expensive digital voice recorders with USB connectivity via a cable, and many will agree that the Zoom H2 is probably the best product out there and well worth its $160 or so price tag.
But I was so hoping...