Digital Voice Recorder Program

I have a SIMS digital voice recorder pen that uses a digital plug (like a cell phone earpiece) to output data from said mini-plug to a parallel port connector which obviously would plug in to LPT1.

My question is simply: "Can I write my own software to read the data and convert it into WAV files or whatever? Or should I give up now because its a proprietary device with private software embedded?

I have no other reason to do this than curiosity, so if its pointless, I won't bother. BTW- I have tried IO.DLL and other methods, but none seem to be compatible with XP. Thanks guys!

HWOODKY

let's put it like this: if somebody would ask me to do this, i would ask for at least 2 month and biiiig big bucks.

you say this device plugs into a parrallel port. my first step would be to setup the device on a computer it works with then get a parrallel port sniffer and sniff all the packets as the device is being read with the software supplied. after you have enough packets i would try to look for similarities in the packets and try to pick out the data portions from the control portions. obviously there must be some standard header in all of the packets that tells the device what the data in the packet is supposed to do.

once you figure out the packet structure i would build a program and get it communicating with the device and sending and retrieving data. then i would look into some of the standard digital audio codecs and try to see what type of audio compression they are using.

this is where a software debugger and a dissassembly of the supplied software would come in handy. if the supplied software plays the audio from the device on your computer speakers it shouldnt be hard to find a good place in a disassembly where you could break the program in a debugger and extract the wave format header which contains the format of the compressed audio.