Review on 🎙️ Recording Made Easy: Discover the Panasonic RR-US360 Digital Voice Recorder by Kyle Wesener

If sound quality and features were the only thing that mattered, this product would probably be worth a 4 rating. It is relatively easy to use and records with quite good quality. Unfortunately, it suffers from several HUGE flaws that could have been a deal breaker if I had figured it out back then. First, although it uses a standard USB mini-plug, for some reason they've settled on a proprietary way of interacting with a computer, and to top it off, a proprietary audio file format. Finally, Panasonic decided to orphan anyone who doesn't stick with the old OS. The first option is simply fatal. Unlike most modern devices that look like standard mass storage devices, these can only be accessed with proprietary software after the proprietary drivers have been installed. If you lose this software like I did, good luck finding a replacement. I found a third party driver website that was generous enough to download them by watching 12 pages of ads instead of paying to download. The fact that I even need proprietary software to access files on the device is just ridiculous. Once you get to these files, they're in a dumb format that needs to be converted using the same dumb proprietary software. At least the ability to convert it to WAV is a mitigation of a really bad design element. Let me regret the inexcusable decision not to support this outside of the operating systems that existed when it was created. This is also UNEXCUSED. This is not a printer or scanner that is expected to wear out after a few years or become essentially obsolete in a short period of time. This is a recorder that will likely last for many years. I guess this comment can be seen as a subset of the comments above, because if they made it work like a standard USB mass storage device and saved the files in a standard audio format, it wouldn't matter at all. However, the fact that I *NEED* software to access recordings is another FATAL problem when that software doesn't work on Vista and now every system in my house runs Vista. My modest investment in this device was simply thrown in the trash as it is now unusable. Panasonic will not update the software. So I advise you to avoid this model like the plague. I'm so upset at having to throw a flawless unit in the trash, and even more so at Panasonic's utter unwillingness to continue supporting their own product, that I doubt I'll want to buy another Panasonic product any time soon. How many other foods would you give up so easily? I won't find out. If you need a voice recorder, go with a company that has a reputation for backing their products and, more importantly, find one that doesn't require proprietary software and records in a standard format. This is not the recorder you are looking for!