Greg Beaubien, 41
Writer and media relations expert
Chicago
Digital voice recorders don’t seem to get the same attention as their digital cousins in the phone, camera, music and television categories. But Greg Beaubien thinks they should.
The Chicago writer uses a tiny digital voice recorder from Sony (model ICD-P28, about $100) to capture important interviews for work, and the far more important giggling and babbling of his 7-month-old daughter, Nicole.
Beaubien, a ghostwriter and speechwriter, used to take interview notes the old-fashioned way: on paper. “I seemed to be frantically jotting down notes as the other person spoke,” he said. “Which is not easy because you miss stuff.”
“Of course, you can record it on an old-fashioned tape, but it’s awkward” to play back and find specific parts of a conversation.
So Beaubien turned to the small Sony recorder, which captures audio on a memory chip. Beaubien’s device holds up to 945 minutes, or nearly 16 hours of sound.
“It’s a tiny little thing you hold in your hand and record meetings or interviews,” he said.
Once the interviews are recorded, Beaubien plugs the recorder into his computer using a USB cable and transfers the digital audio file onto his hard drive. The recorder comes with software, but Beaubien prefers to use RealOne’s player, available free at www.real.com/player.
A separate adapter is sold to connect the recorder to the telephone to capture conversations.
“You can easily fast forward and rewind, and you can get wherever you need to be in the audio file quickly,” he said.
A glutton for punishment, Beaubien opens Microsoft Word and transcribes the audio as it plays on his computer.
“So the player takes up a few inches on my screen, and I’m transcribing and arranging the material.”
And while the interviews are done for his writing, which pays the bills, it’s Beaubien’s recordings of his baby’s chatter that are truly priceless.
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“I kind of sneak up on her with this recorder hidden in my hand, because if she sees it she’ll stop making those sounds and want to play with it,” he said. “I capture her cute coos and babbles and laughs on the device.”
Then, just as some people share photos and music, Beaubien burns his daughter’s recorded sounds onto CDs and shares them with her grandparents.
“My mom couldn’t believe that this was possible,” he said, adding that his parents played the CD “and they just really loved it.”
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