What makes Digital Voice Recorders superior?

While Micro cassette recorders are cost-effective and capable recording devices, digital voice recorders, which offer recording time of up to 22 hours and other advanced features, are fast becoming the recording tool of choice among business professionals and students.

Digital voice recordings last longer than tape, can be easily retrieved and downloaded to your PC and sent via the internet to your transcription service to be converted into documents.

Why do Digital Voice Recorders make heavy dictation more efficient?

Digital Voice Recorders allow users to 'insert edit' and navigate instantly to 'markers' so you can build your dictation in a non - linear fashion. , they also include ways to transfer all of your voice recordings to your computer as files. After the transfer, you can delete the contents of your recorder as the files are now archived on your PC. By downloading recordings to your computer, you can email or transfer them to your Online Transcription Service. These files are usually very small and can be easily sent over the Internet

What if I already have multiple cassette based recorders in use?

If you want to begin using our transcription service without the added time delay inherent with the physical transfer of the tapes to our office we can advise you of various software that will digitise (convert to digital files) the analogue recordings at your office so they can then be transferred to us via the internet for immediate transcription.

Can I use any brand of Digital Voice Recorder?

The short answer is YES... however it is not recommended Many of the voice recorders use their own specific file format. This means that the software that comes with the device must be installed on the PC / Server for those particular audio files to be decoded. The solution is that they all have the capacity to convert the recordings into the uncompressed .WAV format - the downside to this is that the uncompressed .WAV files can be very large and clumsy to transfer over the internet.

We recommend using the professional Olympus or Phillips devices i.e. Olympus DS-4000 as these devices produce high quality yet small in size .DSS files that are compatible with our system.

How are audio files uploaded / sent for transcription?

There are various methods that can be used to transfer your audio files to Online Transcription Services. The method you choose will depend on both the method / device you use to record your dictations, the volume of files (dictations) you send and the IT environment you are situated within.

If you choose to use our free WinScribe Author software to create / record your dictations the files are sent automatically by the software AND the corresponding completed documents are also retrieved. This method requires no intervention or 3rd party software.

When using a handheld digital voice recorder to create your dictations the available methods to transfer the files are

1.  Using our web interface you can upload upto 5 files at a time using your internet browser.

2.  We can provide a free software utility that will monitor 1 or folders on your PC and upload any audio files it finds in those nominated folders automatically (this happens silently in the background while you continue to work on your PC)

3.  You can use any FTP client to connect to our server and upload your files. We recommend using WinSCP which is a free FTP client program that supports Secure FTP (SFTP)

4.  Some of the software programs provided with handheld digital voice recorders have built in FTP functionality and can be configured to transfer the files (and retrieve the completed documents). This feature is provided by the Olympus DSS Player Pro software (Windows version) for example.

If you are situated within a corporate network that is behind fiewalls etc.. the best choices are usually to use your web browser or our free monitoring utility as both these use the HTTP protocol and port 80 which are usually left open as they are required for internet access.

We can accept files that are sent as attachments to emails however most mail servers will block emails with very large attachments. Short dictations created using high compression codecs such as the Olympus .DSS format will usually be small in size and so are generally OK however anything recorded in an uncompressed format such as .WAV or even using multi channel codecs such as .MP3 and .WMA can be very large and are not suited to being emailed.

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