Federal Judiciary

Digital Voice Recorder - update of 2008 post

By Michael C. Smith

  I received a lot of e-mails after my Starting a New Law Office article ran in the Texas Bar Journal in the summer of 2008 about my solution to the dictation issue, so I ran a detailed post here about the handheld digital voice recorder I used to replace the DictaPhone system that I'd spent the first fifteen years of my career using.

Over two years later I'm still very happy with my choice, but I have to report that my trusty RCA RP5022Bsadly  gave up the ghost yesterday morning after processing 687 dictation files (it numbers them sequentially, so I know precisely how many files it processed).  Since we are used to RCA's "Digital Voice Manager" software for managing and transcribing the files, Pam picked up a replacement at Walmart (still in the low $30's), this time a RCA VR5220-A. The software is essentially the same, and although I am still working to figure out which buttons correspond to the old ones, the functions I use seem to be the same. 

The difference is that, first, the same $30 that bought me 64 megs of storage in 2008 yesterday buys 512 megs, which is approximately 200 hours of recording time, which is way more than Pam says I am allowed to have (she tried to find one with less memory, but no luck).  Second, instead of needing a USB cable to plug into my computer, the new recorder has a pop-out USB connector so it plugs in the same as a thumb drive (and can act as an external hard drive for files if you need it to).  I still need the USB cable for other things, and it's actually slightly annoying to try to find a free port, but it's a nice thought, I suppose.  I does make it simpler to just toss the recorder to Pam so she can download the file rather than doing it myself, since she does not normally have a USB cable plugged in.  Normally I do manually transfer the files, or e-mail them if I'm out of the office, but this does give me an additional option.

Full post as published by Eastern District of Texas Federal Court Practice on August 19, 2010 (boomark / email).