Many years ago, before I switched to Apple, I bought the Oplympus digital voice recorder vn-240pc. This memo recorder as the pc part in the type already suggests only works with a Windows operated pc. There are no drivers available for Apple. I used to get by with a spare Windows laptop, but while ago this laptop went off to the forever fields and was no more. I tried to look for drivers and make them work on my mac but with no luck. Now what?
The sensible thing to do is to buy either a new memo recorder or even more sophisticated, use my iPhone for my recordings. Well, my iPhone recorder let me down before and also my Olympus on it’s own is still working fine…
Not a proper solution but an acceptable workaround
So here’s what I did. Please note that this is not a proper solution, but it will get the job done. First of all, you need to get yourself a cable like this one…
Attach one side of the cable to the ear socket on the Olympus voice recorder and attach the other side to the line-in socket of your Apple device, in my case an iMac.
Open Quicktime. If you don’t have Quicktime installed, you can download it here. In Quicktime you are able to record a new audio file. Go to file and choose “new audio recording”. In the settings (the dropdown button next to the record button) you can declare that the audio needs to be taken from the line-in rather than from the built in microphone. You might also want to set the sound quality to maximum. When I chose “high quality” my sound got a little deformed as it was skipping a few rates.
Now press play on the memo recorder and simultaneously press record in the Quicktime player. When the recording is finished you can play it and listen to the result. If the result is to your liking, you can either export or save the file.
If you want you can change the file format after, you can do this in iTunes. Here’s a guide on how to do that.