News

Some deserved good news for Olympus as their flagship professional PCM music recorder the Olympus LS-100 picked up the top award at the prestigious m.i.p.a awards held in April 2013 in Frankfurt, Germany.

The m.i.p.a or Musikmesse International Press Awards is the Grammys of the music equipment industry. Products are voted on by over 100 of the top music magazines from around the world. The Olympus LS-100 beat out the competition, last years winner the Zoom H2N and the Roland R-26 to bag best field recorder. Field recording is the common term for recording outside the recording studio but make no mistake, this black beauty recorder is just as happy in the studio.

Click here for more detail on this award from our UK blog

UK based Dictation Solutions have released an app for recording dictation on an iPhone. Nothing new there, there are hundreds of them I hear you say. But this one is the only app endorsed by Olympus (UK) as it integrates with the Olympus ODMS and DSS Player Pro transcription module software.

For people who use the Olympus digital dictaphones (DS-7000/DS-3500 and the older DS-5000) the Hugo Dictation app is a useful addition to their professional arsenal. Medical and legal professionals who need to record and send dictation while out of the office can use Hugo Dictation and email the audio from their iPhone to their typist or typing pool. The stand out feature which made Olympus UK love this app is its ability to integrate with the transcription module. Recorded dictation can be accompanied by an xml file which defines the Author Id, Work Type and Priority of dictations, looking exactly the same to the typist as if the audio had come from an Olympus digital dictaphone.

Hugo Dictation records in .wav audio format and comes in a free Lite version which is limited to maximum 30 seconds of recording or a paid version which allows longer dictation. At the time of writing Hugo Dictation is at version 1.1 on the Australian iTunes app store and can currently only email dictation, FTP will be added in future releases.

More information about the app including screen shots and how to configure for use with the Olympus transcription module head to our main blog, click here - dictat.es/hugo

Olympus have made available a new firmware update for the professional range of digital dictaphones, the DS-7000 and DS-3500. The upgrade takes the latest firmware to release v1.10 for these recorders. Don't get too excited, only a couple of things have changed in this firmware, of note to general users will be the addition of 2 minutes and 5 minutes to the background illumination setting.

The firmware for the DS-7000 and DS-3500 is updated via a Windows .exe file .. sorry Mac users you will need to find yourself a Windows PC (or use Paralles or VMWare Fusion at your own risk) to flash your recorders.

Full details on this firmware release, firmware release history and where to download the firmware from can be found on our main blog, click the link below:

http://idictate.com.au/2013/04/latest-firmware-ds7000-ds3500-v1-10-olympus-ds-7000-3500-download/

This week Olympus rolled out a bump to their DSS Player Plus v7 audio software for the Mac. The update include a significant update for users of Nuance's Dragon Dictate 3 voice recognition software. Prior to release v7.3.3 audio recorded on the professional range of digital dictaphones (that's the DS-7000, DS-3500, DS-2500, DS-5000, DS-3400 and DS-2400) could not be converted to a high enough bit rate for use with the transcription feature in Dragon Dictate. 

We helped identify a work around for this by using the Olympus Sonority software while we waited for this fix to come. If you are one of the people who got a copy of Sonority from us you must uninstall Sonority prior to applying the DSS Player Plus v7 update (if you don't DSS Player will crash).

More information on this release and the link to download the free update to DSS Player Plus for Mac click the link below:

http://dictat.es/dss-mac-733

Hats off to Olympus for taking notice of the worldwide Mac digital dictation community and quickly planning an update to their DSS Player Plus v7 dictation software after an issue was found using converted .ds2 to .aif audio files for transcription in Nuance's new Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac.

We first reported the issue over on our main blog only last month (click here for that post) and immediately update both Olympus and Nuance Australia about the issue. Basically the sampling rate of .aif audio files created by converting .ds2 dictation in DSS Player Plus did not achieve the sampling rate required by the new transcription feature in Dragon Dictate 3.

We quickly found a work around for this using Olympus Sonority which although not ideal did allow owners of the professional DS-7000 and DS-3500 digital dictaphones to dictate and use their voice recognition software to convert their text to speech. Kudos to Olympus for taking on the issue and very quickly resolving it, an update to DSS Player Plus v7 is expected to be rolled out globally early in 2013.

Full details of the new features in DSS Player Plus for Mac audio conversion over at our main blog - click here

For any customer who has called and spoken to us over the last year looking for a great quality meeting recorder or music recorder you will know just how much we evangelised the LS-3. This was one superb little package which covered just about all audio recording bases. Well today our last LS-3 left the office never to be replaced, Olympus notified us earlier this week that the LS-3 was no more.

Have to admit we were surprised, such a great recorder why would it be End Of Lifed? The answer lied in a clue in a blog post from Olympus America last month. The Olympus LS-12 and Olympus LS-14, two brand new linear PCM music recorders and our gut feeling is that this duo is heading down under as the LS-3 replacement. No official confirmation from Olympus Imaging Australia yet but as soon as we hear we will update you. We would expect the LS-12 and LS-14 to grace our shores in early 2013 so watch this space.

In the meantime, for those looking for a top notch meeting, focus group or interview recorder grab yourselves the Olympus DM-3 and never miss a word.

Olympus have just released to their servers an update to both their ODMS dictation and transcription module software on Windows. The release takes the software to version R6.1.0 and is a free update.

ODMS R6.1.0 addresses a number of bugs, including the most popular one that we have experienced in which transcription typists could not hear dictation through their headphones, as well as adding some new features, compatibility with virtual environments such as VMWare and Citrix Xen. But most Windows fans will be pleased to see that ODMS R6.1.0 is now Windows 8 compatible, a big tick in the box for all the early adopters.

Click here for the complete list of changes in ODMS R6.1.0 

Over at our main blog - idictate.com.au - we have just posted a list of 18 alternative uses for digital voice recorders and dictaphones. Some are tongue in cheek, some push the boundaries of ethics, some are fun and some are serious.

Digital voice recorders are not just for recording interviews, meetings, focus groups or client/patient letters and notes. With a little out of the square thinking they can be used for all manner of other things. My personal favourite is number 15 !! 

Click here to head to our main blog to see the full list of 18. 

Many people are looking at voice recognition software both on Windows (Dragon NaturallySpeaking) and on the Mac with the latest release of Dragon Dictate 3 which has just arrived in Australia. You may be interested but you may have also been swayed by a number of factors. Maybe Siri hasn't worked 100% of the time for you and you are comparing that to Dragon installed, evolving and learning on your MacBook or iMac. Maybe you know someone from the Windows world who tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking maybe five or more years ago and had a bad experience back then.

Things change and in technology they change very very quickly. Look at the processing power we have at our finger tips today compared to even a couple of years ago. RAM is cheap and plentiful, hard disks faster or even solid state, CPUs have multiple cores. Technology has evolved rapidly and so has advancement in speech recognition technology.

If you think that speech recognition might be a great productivity tool for you and a huge time saver head over to our main blog where we have compiled a number of videos. These are all videos created by Nuance to show off the latest features in Dragon Dictate 3 for the Mac. With each video I have written a short blurb explaining which features are useful and why you would use them.

Click here for our blog post - Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac – The Best Way To Find Out About It Is To Watch The Demo Videos

Finally it has arrived, the boxed versions of Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac are here and ready to ship. There are three variants to choose from which are:

• Dragon Dictate 3 - with standard USB headset/mic { SKU: S601A-G00-3.0 }
• Dragon Dictate 3 - with wideband bluetooth headset/mic { SKU: S601A-GN9-3.0 }
• Dragon Dictate 3 - with a basic digital voice recorder { SKU: S601A-GC3-3.0 }

Those of you thinking of dabbling with voice recognition I would go with the standard USB headset/mic combo to begin with. Microphones can always be upgraded later and the headset/mic that comes as standard is adequate to get you going. Personally I am a fan of the free Dragon Microphone iOS app and I tend to use my iPhone as my preferred mic choice.