Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(9 customer reviews) 40 of 45 people found the following review helpful
make sure you know what you're buying,
July 7, 2005 Caraculiambro (La Mancha and environs) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Panasonic RR-US380 Compact IC Digital Voice Recorder (Office Product)
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...Read more
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Save a lot of typing,
March 2, 2006 no duces (Montana) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Panasonic RR-US380 Compact IC Digital Voice Recorder (Office Product)
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...Read more
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Quality recorder with a few weaknesses,
August 28, 2007 Kevin Renn (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Panasonic RR-US380 Compact IC Digital Voice Recorder (Office Product)
I have used my Panasonic RR-US380 for about 2 years and have been happy with the performance of this product. The quality of the audio is above average ( I tried about 8 different models) and compression of the sound file is very efficient. If you plan on using it for personal use it would be a good choice.
If you want to use it in a business setting I would not recommend it. The problem is the proprietary file types that Panasonic uses cannot be played with anything other then their software. You can convert to .wav but it's an extra step that shouldn't be needed. They do offer a player you can give to someone with the files but I've never been able to get it to work.
The other big problem is the access rights the software requires. It can not be used by multiple users on a single PC running Windows XP. It must be run by someone with administrator rights who installed it. If I install it and run it, and you have administrator rights, it still will not run...Read more
