I need a way to record many, many hours of conversations in a variety of environments- mostly conversations happening in a group. I don't really care about music recording or playing, but I need a way to transfer the conversations to my PC (Win XP). With luck, I'll find a way to use something like Dragon Naturally Speaking to convert the sound files to text.
Minidisc sounds good since I can carry around as many discs as I need; I'll be doing many hours of recording in one session. However, I'm confused about file transfers. I saw the article on "Portable Recorders with Uploading Facilities"- which said that there wasn't any way to upload files from minidiscs, but it seems in at least one of the threads here, that isn't the case.
If minidisc isn't a good way to do this, can anyone suggest some other technology I should be looking at? I have about $400 that I can spend, but the less the better. I need portability and a recording time of at least 8 hours per session.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Beth