Olympus Digital Wave Player -- Where Is Folder A? What Time Is It?

I was using an Olympus VN-960PC digital voice recorder, and was downloading recordings from that device to Windows XP via mini-USB cable.  Unlike the Olympus VN-6200PC, the VN-960PC used the Digital Wave Player (DWP) program to download and display recordings.  DWP showed the actual time and date when the recording was made.  That information was not visible in Windows Explorer; WinEx would just show the date and time when the file was downloaded.

I was able to rename DWP's files (in the format DW_A0001.wav) so that the date and time of creation were contained in the filenames.  I did this using the Aqua Deskperience screen capture program to save the onscreen data from DWP into a text file, and then massaging the contents of that file with text commands (e.g., MID) in Microsoft Excel to produce a batch file to rename the files.  The batch file would run on the WinXP command line, and each line in the batch file would contain the command to rename one file.  The Excel formula for this conversion was something like ="ren "&char(34)&[old filename]&char(34)&" "&char(34)&[new filename]&char(34).  (The meaning of that command becomes visible when you run it.)  The resulting batch file line would say something like "ren DW_0001 2010-06-03 08.41 Recording.wav."

To make that approach work, I needed to be able to view the downloaded recordings in DWP.  The recordings were typically saved in a folder whose name matched the name of the folder I had used to save them on the VN-960PC.  Since I typically used Folder A, the usual location of the downloads, in WinXP, was \My Documents\Digital Wave Player\Message\Folder A.

But now I had a problem.  I was copying the downloaded files from a machine running WinXP SP3 to another machine running WinXP SP2 in a VMware Workstation virtual machine (VM) on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I had installed DWP in this VM, and when I ran DWP in the VM it did show the usual set of folders (Folder A, Folder B, etc.), but I could not find where on the computer those folders were actually located.

The answer was that I was looking for the wrong folder name.  It was not Folder A.  It was FolderA, without a space, and it was being created in the usual place.  That part was simple enough.  I wanted to explain my setup, though, so that I could address some questions that I have seen in other posts online, and to pass along a couple of related insights.

One such insight was that, as it turns out, it was also possible to run DWP in Ubuntu.  The basic solution was to install Ubuntu with Wine, and then just find the DWP installation file (setup.exe) and double-click on it.  (You could also use Wine to run other Windows programs.)  The DWP installation file was already on my system because I set it up as a dual-boot, but I could also have copied it over.

Someone had also created an Ubuntu command-line program to download files from the DVR.  My search led to the discovery that this program, odvr, also had a GUI in its latest version.

Incidentally, in case anyone wonders, I was not able to get the VN-960PC to work directly with Ubuntu itself, nor with WinXP in an Ubuntu VM.  In other words, I could run DWP in a VM to view the DW*.wav files that I had copied there, and I could run DWP in Ubuntu via Wine, but I could not get the hardware to work such that DWP would offer to transfer the files from the DVR to the computer.  All I could get in the WinXP VM was a "usb device not recognized" error.

The other thing I wondered was whether Ubuntu might have a way of extracting the date and time from the DW_A0001.wav file without making me jump through those hoops in Aqua Deskperience and Excel.  The creation date and time information had to be in there somewhere, but how could I get it out?

I took a look at a DW_A0001.wav file in WinXP (right-click > Properties > Summary).  It said it was a 4-bit mono file saved in IMA ADPCM format at a bit rate of 88kbps and an audio sample rate of 22 kHz.  Those values would probably have been different if I had been using the VN-960PC's SP or LP rather than HQ recording modes.  Properties did not state the correct date for file creation; as just noted, it claimed that the created, modified, and accessed dates and times were identical.  I couldn't figure out a solution, so I posted a question on it in an Ubuntu forum.  That didn't draw a quick response, so I tried again in a Windows forum.  No luck there either.  I wasn't turning up much in a search, so I had to let this slide for now.

Review: Olympus WS-321M Digital Voice Recorder

I bought an Olympus WS-321M Digital Voice Recorder (DVR) in January 2009. I sold it on eBay not much thereafter, and went back to using an Olympus VN-960PC instead. Here is a summary of the reasons for that decision.

The most immediately noticeable advantage of the VN-960PC is the audio volume. It picks up everything and plays it back loud and clear. The WS-321M was much harder to hear. It appears that the latter does not normalize its audio recordings effectively. This, by itself, was such a marked difference as to help me decide which recorder I preferred. The same problem occurred with input from a remote microphone; there was also a problem with distortion of loud sounds. It really felt as if Olympus had taken a substantial step backwards in these regards.

One feature I like on the VN-960PC is that it has a red LED light that blinks when you pause recording. You don't have to read anything; you can tell right away that you didn't accidentally push the wrong button. Speaking of buttons, on the VN-960PC it is much easier to tell, without looking, which button you are pressing. Also, when you do pause the DVR, you can hear a click on the recording on the WS-321M, but not on the VN-960PC - which is distracting if you are dictating something one phrase at a time, as you think through it. And when you start recording with the VN-960PC, it starts recording almost instantly, whereas the WS-321M requires a second or so to get warmed up. It may not sound like much, until you listen back to the things you thought you had captured well on the recorder.

The WS-321M is white, with relatively large flat surfaces. In other words, it looked like it was designed to appear beat-up and dirty. By contrast, I carried the VN-960PC for years, in pockets with keys and such; I dropped it; and after all that it still looked pretty much the same. I did like that the WS-321M boasted long battery life with just one battery. The downside was that, when the battery did die, it did not save as much as it had already recorded, as the VN-960PC does. Instead, whatever you were recording is lost in its entirety if the juice dries up midsentence.

I liked the WS-321M for having the date and time right in the names of the files it was recording. On the VN-960PC, the DVR would record the date and time, and you could see it in the supplied Digital Wave Player software; but if I wanted the date and time to be part of the filename for multiple recordings, the best solution I could figure out was to display those data onscreen, use a program like Aqua Deskperience to capture them, do a directory listing of filenames at the DOS prompt in Windows XP, and then use an Excel spreadsheet to merge the two. Not a pretty sight.

The WS-321M did have the advantage of being more Windows-compatible. I didn't need an adapter cable to transfer recordings from the DVR to the computer (although they did say I was supposed to use the cord they provided), because it was designed with a standard USB connector right inside its case. When I connected the WS-321M to the computer, it appeared as a regular USB drive in Windows Explorer; not so with the VN-960PC. Also, in my limited testing I did not find that connecting the WS-321M to the computer caused the computer to reboot. The VN-960PC did cause that problem. In years of experience, I noticed that this occurred primarily when I had already connected the DVR once since my most recent reboot. That is, after uploading my recordings from the VN-960PC to the computer, I would try not to do so again until after the next reboot. This problem happened on a couple different computers, so I do think it was a problem with the VN-960PC. I also sometimes got an unwanted reboot when I'd had the computer on for a day or more at the time when I connected the VN-960PC to it.

Finally, see my other post if you're thinking about using a DVR to record speech that will then be converted to written text.