Olympus DSS Player for Mac

Anyone (like me) who has an Olympus digital voice recorder knows what a pain in the butt can be to deal with the propriety .DSS format in which the older Olympus devices stored their files—especially since Olympus's updates could not keep pace with the evolution of the Mac OS X's more rapid development schedule. With the special USB cable Olympus gave you, you could still move your .DSS files off of the recorder and onto your Mac, but the Mac could not play .DSS files, nor was there any audio converter software other than NCH's Switch available to convert .DSS into something useful, like .mp3, and even then, Switch could not convert the lower LP mode, or even some of the SP mode files. Without the DSS Player to convert those .DSS files to .AIFF as the intermediary format, users were essentially stuck with a great piece of hardware but no software to work with it, unless you still kept your PowerPC alive. Well, it turns out that Olympus actually did update DSS Player to a Mavericks-compatible version 7.5 this past December, although you had to damn lucky to accidentally come across a blog which mentioned it, while also adding that downloading of the upgrade was restricted to dealers and others who access to a private portal. Why Olympus would restrict access is beyond my imagination, unless their marketing department is run by a bunch of punitive monks, because people have been clamoring for such an upgrade and if you went through all of the software upgrades available for downloading for all of current models of digital voice recorders in the entire Olympus line—which I did—you still would not find a link allowing you download the new Mavericks-compatible version of DSS Player. At least not at the American website. For some reason though, if you Google correctly for it, you can find it on the Australian website at: http://www.olympus.com.au/Support/Latest-Product-Updates/Audio-Software.aspx I suggest that MacUpdate grab it up and make it available for current owners of Olympus digital voice recorders to download. This is an upgraded, so only users who had obtained an installation disc of the original application (and upgraded it over the years to at least version 7) will be able to take advantage of the upgrade file. I did. It runs great. Not that I'm going to get rid of my PowerMac, but it sure is nice to get unstuck. Now I can actually get more use out of my DS-2 recorder!

I updated my Macbook Pro to OS 10.7.3 and visited the Olympus site to download the latest, Lion-compatible, DSS player 7.2.8 It installed OK and would bring up and play all of my old recordings from my DS-2 recorder that were on my hard drive. When I plugged the DS-2 into the USB port, the player program started but nothing else happened. No files on the recorder were displayed. Google searches seem to indicate that older recorders, specifically any of the Olympus units that are in the "non-professional" category, are no longer supported. My emails to Olympus have gone unanswered. I will never buy another Olympus recorder. I am now looking for a good unit from another manufacturer that supports standard recording formats that can be used with MacSpeech Scribe.

Upon launch it states that an installation of version 7 is required. Then it quits. Version 7 is there. I agree - testing prior to deployment and support for this app on a Mac is sadly lacking. Apparently lost in translation. Can't rate it if it doesn't launch. OS 10.5.8 / Intel MacPro. I always have to revert to version 6.x, which is barely usable.

The previous versions of DSS Player were wretched applications that functioned just barely adequately and had an atrocious UI that was obviously a Windoze port with little effort put into it. Now they've dropped support for older recorders such as my DS-330. In turn I think I will be dropping my future support for Olympus.

Thanks bosskev for the heads-up on the near uselessness of this release. One is left to wonder about the lapse of mind within those creating a software package requiring almost ten times the space it should reasonably need while neglecting support for some rather pricey related hardware products that were current less than a year ago and are still sold as new by mass-marketers round the globe. It would greatly surprise me to learn that a more usable, better engineered app could not have been written in 9-30 mb that didn't support every DS-player Olympus has made to date. Frankly, it's absurd to think otherwise. While it is true that Olympus has continued to uphold their good name in the cameras they produce, so far as the Macintosh side of their business is concerned at least, their software has steadily gone from the bemusingly bad to tragically worse. Instead of enabling longtime and long-suffering DS users to move DS access to their ICBMs, Oly' ships this offensively half-thawed mammoth. Something tells me, this following on the equally preposterous recent travesty that was Olympus Master 2, we have yet to reach the nadir of Olympus' ill-considered software design. They seem to be on a roll. Another most disheartening event from a company I have for several decades had only the greatest respect. It causes me shame to watch this decline. Note that using an app such as Pacifist will allow you to extract some components from this package which will assist you in having some manipulative access to DSS files on PowerPC & x86. Crumbs.