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 enlarge | Brand: Panasonic
Category: CE
List Price: $99.95
Buy New: $59.99
You Save: $39.96 (40%)
Rating:  8 reviews
Media: Electronics
Batteries: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.2 x 2
MPN: RR-US380
Model: RR-US380
UPC: 037988252671
EAN: 0037988252671
ASIN: B0009EQGFK
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-8 of 8 | | « PREV | | |
 Great product, horrible support September 13, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've had my rr-us380 for almost a year and recently needed to reinstall the voice editing software. When I couldnt find the installer cd I assumed I'd be able to download from the panasonic site, after all the software would only really be useful to someone who had bought their hardware. After a frustrating amount of time looking for that I finally landed on an email form for support and sent an email asking how I could obtain the software. Actually, the form didn't give any feedback after hitting submit so I kind of assumed I had sent...
Two days later I called their toll free number at 1-800-211-pana and spent a good half hour wending from parts to support to other departments through their jeckyl and jeeves like voice menu system (which doesnt "understand" operator or other or...). Support sent me to sales, sales disconnected me, then sales sent me to support. Finally Katy in sales broke the news to me: the part (for the software I can only use on the device I bought from them) is $25 plus shipping of $6... for something I had hoped I'd quickly download off their site. (Note that the "manual" is a single 11x16 page you -can- download free as a pdf. All I need here is the software installer.)
That is really horrible service. They could have gotten me for the $25 particularly if I hadn't had to have -worked- so hard to find out it would cost me (and especially if it was a key for immediate download...) but having to work to find that I would have to pay for software media (the software I already own...) was really bad. Then there's the $6 "handling" fee that tells me I'll have to wait on some delivery service rather then downloading... grrrr....
That said I'll confess: this is great hardware. It's extremely convenient and the software (despite a -horrible- glitzy and unintuitive interface) it extremely usefull. I'm going to go now, and talk myself into buying an Olympus. But I'm not sure I'll succeed (they might still get their $31 filthy lucre from me).
 Save a lot of typing March 3, 2006
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I bought this to replace my micro-cassette recorder for a series of 1 on 1 interviews not knowing the great software that comes with it. While on the road I loaded the software and as a previous reviewer states it is alot to get through. However, if you want to dictate your own papers this is a great system. The speech recognition software did not help much for the interviews, but my own work afterwards writing up the results was "greatly" reduced.
The intial setup of voice recognition is long, cumbersome and sometimes frustrating as the software tries to learn your speech patterns (and using the learning/training software multiple times helps accuracy ALOT), but it was no different with ViaVoice and MS voice recognition software. Once the software knows your voice prepare to type very little. I was writing a paper and decided to see what would happen. I talked (rambled) for about 65 minutes total. The system recognized about 97% of my speech. I transferred the translated speech file to my word processor and let it find the grammatical/structural errors and then I went through the paper while listening to the speech on my computer. I stopped and made corrections as needed. The freedom to just talk rather than stop to type up my thoughts as I went along was incredible.
If you are in a place where transcribing your own words takes up much of your time (graduate student, small business owner) this recorder and the included software is terrific. For the classroom, I use it as a backup to my notes. The microphone picks up everything so sometimes it can be frustrating. One interview picked up a wall clock ticking about 10 feet away.
Plan on spending a few minutes getting used to the buttons, menus and functions of the recorder itself, but most of it is reasonably intuitive. The multiple subdirectories makes working on different projects a real joy. You can be dictating/working on one topic, get a brainstorm, change to another directory say what you want and get back to your original work with almost no effort. Then when you hook up to your computer to transfer the files all your wit and wisdom is saved separately. It does take some mental gymnastics to work your way around the computer file transfer portion (just read the PDF file a couple times and pay attention to the direction arrows on the screen) but that gets eaiser with repetition.
make sure you know what you're buying July 7, 2005
40 out of 45 found this review helpful
If you're just looking for a device to replace a tape recorder so's you can record lectures or yourself, DON'T BUY THIS. It's way more than what you need.
You see, it's actually a VOICE EDITOR. So the instructions are quite complicated (the PDF file, for example, is 81 pages).
It comes with a software program that you set up on your computer, but which, in my estimation, is not user-friendly. I've had it for like a week and I'm still trying to figure it out.
Not that the product is a piece of junk or anything. It's a quite solidly-made little machine.
But if you're looking to simply record voices, this is WAY more complicated than you need, and you're gonna spend hours figuring out how to get it to do simple tasks.
Another complaint: the audio files you create can be played via the "in-house" software system or transformed into WAV files, after which they are portable. But you must have other software if you'd like to further convert the WAV files into Mp3's or WMA's.
UPDATE: After having used this thing all summer for a college course, I would like to add additional insights gleaned after having used the thing long after figuring it out.
First of all, the mike seems to be of really poor quality. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense, since presumably Panasonic is including the same mike as in the cassette-tape recorders. But no. The quality you'll get is markedly below what you can get with a cassette-tape recorder. And there's no "adjustment" level for the quality of the audio file you're making.
As a result of this, the thing will maybe go for 5 hours before it's "full." Since this is non-adjustable, this is a useful piece of information.
I used it, as I said, for recording a professor: though he moved around a bit, for the most part I was sitting under his nose for most of the lectures. For this situation, set the thing on "dictation," rather than "meeting." Counterintuitive, but you'll get better results.
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