I need to understand how digital voice recorders work and the best way to transcribe what is recorded.?

Question

wave files, flash drives are possible ways of transcribing

Answer 1

Digital recorders convert a microphone analog signal to digital at a given sampling rate and store the converted digital values. There is a detailed article here of how they work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio

"Transcribing" would be using some kind of voice recognition software to convert the spoken word to a written record. There are some features in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Note but I don't know how well they work.