iPod and iTunes Hacks

Use Your iPod as a Dictaphone

With a couple handy additions from Belkin, you can turn your iPod into a Dictaphone.

In this age of voice-recognition technology, the almighty Dictaphone is still, well, almighty. Dictating to a computer will still render your eloquent speech garbled, even though great strides have been made in voice recognition. When the iPod first came out, many people thought that because it looked like a Dictaphone, it must be one. Sure enough, when a newer version of the iPod’s firmware came out, irreverent hackers like you and me noticed that there was a voice-recording ability (albeit only six seconds) embedded deep in the iPod’s firmware. This discovery was a hint of great things to come. With this hack, your iPod can become a Dictaphone extraordinaire.

Belkin makes two recording products for the iPod. The first is called the Voice Recorder for iPod (http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process? Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201526&pcount=&Product_Id=158384; $59.99). It is a self-contained unit; just plug it into your iPod, and start talking into the built-in microphone. The second product, the Universal Microphone Adapter (http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Product_Id=169368; $39.99), has no built-in microphone. Instead, you plug a microphone into it.

Another key difference between the two is the quality of the recorded audio. The ...