If you want to carry around a device which is no bigger than your standard USB pen drive but want to record audio, listen up. You need this thing. The Allreli USB voice recorder arrives in a slim unassuming box and has a snug top to cover the USB port which connects it to your computer. There’s also a small loop to connect it to your keyring and the whole lot only costs $21.99 on Amazon USA or £15.99 here on Amazon UK.
There’s one of my “recorded in the car” videos below and you’ll see me repeatedly state that it records directly to MP3. It doesn’t. It records WAV files… sorry about that.
You can use it as a USB drive too, so if you want to chuck files on there you can. Just stick it into your laptop or PC and use it like you would with any other USB drive. As a voice recorder, without any files on it, there’s space for 36 hours of recordings on the 8GB drive.
The battery, as I’ve found, is really rather good and can record for a full 13 hours before the battery runs down. Much longer than your smartphone would last if you tried to record audio that way. A recharge takes around 2-3 hours and you get red LED’s on the top of the gadget to show you how full the battery is. They’ll also show you how much space is left on the device too.
Here’s an example of the audio quality recorded on the voice recorder. It’s very decent and has a good pick-up on the microphone. Plus there’s the added benefit of the size. You can literally drop it next to the person that is talking – be it a presenter, a lecturer or whoever – and it’ll record like that for ages.
Overall, I was impressed with the simple operation and the lack of battery-sucking displays – just 4 simple LED’s for showing you the storage remaining and the power remaining. Simple, effective and, if you’re not doing much audio recording, you can whack some files on it just as you would with any USB mass storage pen.