convert what?

I rented a Digital Audio recorder from the Peabody tech service in order to start doing my podcast. It was an Olympus DS-30 and it was AMAZING! I am thinking about getting one of my own for personal use. I had been using the recorder for many different things throughout the week. I interview a principal and teacher for one class. I interview my mother and brother for another class. All the while I kept adding folders onto the recorder thinking it would be easy to upload the audio files to my computer. I decided to test it out before I started working on the podcast. I figured it would be better to figure everything out first, that way I can focus on my content and presentability.

I plugged the USB into my mac and poof...NOTHING! So I tried clicking on random things. Still nothing. So I tried googling DS-30 and itunes. (I love that google is now a verb!) One website said I needed to buy a converter program. Another said I needed to download Windows Media Audio. After several more searches I discovered that this amazing little device only records in WMA's meaning they are useless to macs, unless I use a third party to convert the files to mp3s. So this is all over my head! I am on the phone with my techie step-father trying to get him to speak in English to me about what I am supposed to download where.

First I download "Switch" and then find out that I have to download a separate program in order to allow the converted files to play in iTunes! What a big fat mess. After I finally figured it all out I was so tired I couldn't even do my podcast. I guess it is one more thing to add to the list of things to do tomorrow. It just proves that thinking technology is going to be easy only curses the user. The only upside to this whole fiasco...I didn't have to pay for a new program.