Many of us are recording and processing interviews. There are many different technologies available and it might be useful to discuss our experiences to make it easier for people to decide what they need before, they start spending money.

There are basically two types of things we need to look at: 

• hardware
• software
  

Hardware:

Here you have two choices: a specialized voice recorder/dictation machine (such as the dictaphone by Olympus that is available at CARE) or an mp3 player with a microphone. (Of course, you could also record directly to a computer.) Specialized digital voice recorders have many useful functions for recording and playback on the machine itself but I prefer to use an MP3 Player with a microphone to record and do all the editing and transcription on the computer.

Here are a few links I've recently recommended to a friend: 

http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Land-Player-VL-543A-Blue/dp/B000BKO2LW or http://www.amazon.com/RCA-RD2317-Personal-Digital-Recording/dp/B00092M1TC

with this as a microphone:
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-ECM-DS30P-Electret-Condenser-Microphone/dp/B0007N55K0

Another useful piece of hardware for transcription is a foot pedal so that you can pause without stopping typing but I know relatively little about them. If you Google for transcription software , you will find lots of links with more information.

Software:

The most famous free software for recoding and editing audio is Audacity (but it is better suited to music). I personally use TotalRecorder from High Criteria which is rather dated and only suitable for simple editing (also not free). They also offer a piece of software called Transcription Buddy which can be bought with a footpedal. If you record directly into MP3 (which I always do, if possible) I highly recommend the free MP3DirectCut. It is fast and powerful but it may take a few moments to figure out (the only problem is that, as it's name suggests, it doesn't work with WAV or other files). Another piece of free software you might find useful is Audiobook Cutter which makes it easy to cut up long MP3 files based on pauses.

Many people ask if it is possible to have a computer do the transcription for you. To that the short answer is no. There is software to transcribe careful speech targeted at transcription (such as doctors' or legal reports) but nothing that can make sense of casual conversation. However, there is software (really expensive software) that can help you search large audio databases for keywords. But it will not produce accurate transcripts and requires fairly high-quality recordings. You can see how it works on services such as Podscope and Podzinger that search podcast databases. The results are surprisingly decent but they leave out lots of text and often just guess at what's being said.

Another useful source of information are people doing podcasting. I recommend, the following two websites: http://www.podcastgearguy.com and http://www.podcastingtricks.com, although they contain much that is of interest of to people who produce audio for easy listening rather than just transcription.

Please add your own experiences and suggestions.