I recently explained how to use your PC for voice recording. Well, portable digital recorders are also available. I bought an Olympus WS-320M unit that is also an MP3/WMA flash drive player with one gigabyte of storage capacity. (Larger capacity units are also available.)

Like most digital music players it is quite small, but performs beautifully. In addition to a stereo earphone output, it also has a built-in monaural speaker. It even has an input that will accommodate a stereo microphone setup.

The built-in microphone works fine for voice recording, but is very sensitive to one's hands on the device. I overcame this with a combination headset/microphone, and may buy a unidirectional mike that would pick up even less background sounds.

I find navigating the device to be wonderfully easy, going from listening to podcasts downloaded from online radio stations to playing favorite MP3s downloaded from my music pages . (I'm too cheap to subscribe to any online music services.) Switching between playing and recording is also remarkably easy.

Attached to a PC via a USB cable, the device shows up under My Computer as an additional disk drive, with five ready-made folders in which you can save your recorded voice files. A sixth folder named Music will hold hundreds of MP3 and WMA files. Just drag and drop them from your PC's music folder(s). Files can be deleted via your PC or with the unit's built-in Erase command. It couldn't be much easier.

The recorder/player is powered by a single AAA alkaline battery, which can be easily replaced when needed.

We bought the Olympus online from Amazon.com for $164 (a substantially discounted price) and received next-day shipping.

Many of the full-length vocal/orchestral songs on my site are also WAVs and can be downloaded to any PC.

As for downloading songs from this site, detailed instructions are included on the various music pages: