My brother wanted me to get him an mp3 recorder. After some research, this led me to understand that the sandisk m230 was the best option. I may get one myself and use it for podcasting. Who wants the extra clutter of a microphone laying around on your desk?

I run my own radio station and preview songs for it. This means I need to be overly picky about quality. I have listened to an ipod and yes ipod fans are going to hate me for this, but the sandisk player is way better. I was impressed with everything from recording, to mp3 playback, to the fm radio tuner, and the headphones. It also included a usb dongle, all for around $22 with free shipping from Gearxs.

Here are the recording stats for your future reference. (32kbps recording at 4:25 the total file size was 1.03mb). The out put was in .wav format but you can convert to mp3 using a free online conversion tool like I did. As you can see the 512mb version he got is good for 35 hours of recording "if" I did the math right. Aside from my own, not so great of voice, here is a live preview of a sample recording. Note that I did use Media Convert to switch over to mp3 format. However, I think the quality is still the same. Nothing more or less than the original.

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Oh, and as a geek, I have to brag that this file is self hosted on my own personal network and web server at my location.