Sound quality can't be surpassed!

I'm a vocalist and bought this unit to help learn music and hear nuances in my voice. It does not disappoint! Using both a very good quality, expensive external microphone (Sony stereo microphone for digital - ECM-DS70P) and the provided ear plugs, I can hear my voice quality better than just listening to my voice with nothing! It is vital in helping me clean up my tones. In fact the quality is so good that I've not bothered to figure out how to record music on my computer, I just play it on my computer, record it with my Olympus DS2 and make a CD from that (using the software and converting it to itunes). The speaker on the unit is lousy so you have to use the headphones to hear clearly, I'm sure that's why they are included in the package. The built-in microphone is ok for dictation and normal, speaking use (again, use the headphones to really hear it), but my quality-needs make an external microphone vital.

You can convert to itunes with no problem (it's all in the itunes program)as well as other MP3 formats. I always use the highest quality recording and that only gives me 1 hour of recording time. Sometimes that's inconvenient, but I regularly download to my computer and empty my recorder. The edit features of the software are very useful. WMA files are fairly large by nature so they take a bit of time (a couple of minutes for 3 minute song) to email but I regularly email copies of my recordings anyway.

File-naming is possible only on the computer. I'd rather reserve my recorder memory for recording anyway so that's ok with me. But if you recorded more than a handfull of files before accessing the computer it would be irritating because the files are numbered chronologically.

I don't know how other recorders work, but I find it comforting that deleting isn't easy and anytime the record button is pushed it starts a new file instead of recording over a old one. Don't forget to hit stop or it'll record till either the batteries die or all memory is filled up! I like the indexing feature for finding a specific spot. It took me pouring over the manual to figure out that the "hold" button is the power button -- a battery-saving necessity.

My cons may be available on higher-end units. I paid $130 for my DS2 and $90 for my microphone.