Stop, loser, what's that sound?

I bought my MP3 player primarily for the voice recorder, which I wanted mostly so I could record song ideas on it. I've captured a couple of songs in the couple of years I owned it, so not so much success there. I've also tried using it as a voice memo, but it's not convenient enough to just whip out and talk into with a moment's thought…

You would think that my cellphone would be the bomb for this, the way it is for my photos. Sadly, there is a fundamental problem. Both my last cellphone and this one, being Verizon phones, run on Qualcomm's BREW "operating system". The standard voice recorder compression (some kind of wacky LPC scheme) built into BREW is completely martian, and can't be read by any software I can find, including proprietary Windows apps. I can download sound files off the phone with BitPim, but there it stops.

Of course, I can exploit the "analog hole" with a piece of wire, which is how I got the song I recorded on my cellphone off there the first time (after discovering the problem of the previous paragraph). But this is slow as life, ugly, and really not acceptable in 2006 in my humble opinion.

So I'm still looking for the perfect "tricorder"™. I'm starting to get a Nokia 770 together; maybe that will be the answer. Or maybe the phone thing will get cracked by me or by someone else.

Bleah. Exponentially accelerating progress, but still too slow. I hate losing. (B)