OK, so for a basic player to just play music while at the gym what do you think? It sounds suboptimal, but I can't see anything better available locally, and this close I need to go with local. Here you can get sony, years old irivers (some still floating around in stores), random cheapo ones and ipods. I don't think I'm missing any. criteria: - pretty basic - 4+ GB - moderately decent audio (pleasurable to listen to, but nothing fancy) - small (<100g) - no need for specific software to put music on - likely to last a few years - very preferably a clip. I'm not aware of anything else available locally that meets that criteria. It does have shuffle: http://www.sony-asia.com/microsite/walkman_i-manuals/NWZ-B172F-B173F/eng/con... and pdf manual (really badly formatted): support.sony-asia.com.edgesuite.net/consumer/IM/4414277311.pdf On 20 December 2012 17:53, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Somebody wrote:
How are you finding the PMP you got? Looking at one for a friend for Christmas, so a quick reply would be good. I'm thinking that one fits what he uses it for pretty well.
Sure thing! I was wondering whether I should bother, since I doubted anyone would be interested - apparently someone is :-) I'm a grumpy curmudgeon, so feel free to infer glowing praise for any aspects I neglect to bitch about.
Short version: not as good as my old PMP, but tolerable. Would buy again at A$25, but not worth A$60.
Long version:
Most annoying thing, hands down, is that in top-to-bottom menus, turning the dial clockwise (forward) means "up", and turning it widdershins (back) means "down". This is completely counterintuitive.
FM radio reception is poo, presumably because it has no whacking great antenna. In Hawthorn, 3PBS and 3RRR have static drifting in and out over the signal, though it's still intelligible.
I've gotten the hang of using back, forward and play/pause/off while it's in my pocket, but it's very hard to hit the other buttons accurately without looking. This is partly because there are buttons both sides of the device, so you can it the wrong side by accident when trying to get leverage to hit the other side. It's also easy to hit the "zappin" button instead of volup.
It is not feasible to switch between mp3 and radio without looking, because it takes five key presses. When turning it off or switching to radio and back, it *is* smart enough to remember what radio station you're on and what track and folder/genre/whatever of MP3 you were listening to.
Rather than getting data from a 4-pin 3.5mm to USB, it has a USB A male on the end of it. (And a cap, which I haven't lost yet.) The device is bulky enough that I can't e.g. plug it into the front of an x360, but I can plug it into the back port.
When listening to an MP3 audo book, if I turned the device off and back on again, it resumes imperfectly -- it seems to be within ±10s of where I actually stopped listening. Simply hitting pause without it turning off, doesn't exhibit this issue. When I accidentally hit "forward" partway through a 100min book, it took me a long time to find my place again, because the fast forward and rewind don't increase speed logarithmically as you continue to hold them down.
When playing music, you can play by folder, or by genre and some other stuff, but it's tedious to look through it. It doesn't appear to have a randomize order / shuffle function. If you say "play everything in this folder" or "play absolutely everything", it uses one line of the two-line display to tell you that's what you picked, so the other line has to marquee back and forth to show you the track name and artist and so forth. This was annoying when I was trying to find out the artist and the LCD backlight turned off before it marqueed past the track name.
When you mount it, it's a FAT of some sort, and you can just drop MP3s into anywhere in the tree. When you next boot it, it'll spend a while crawling the directory tree and generating an index. This took a couple of deciseconds after I half-filled it. The default filesystem is full of FOO.EXE and FOO.IDX type files that I am, frankly, scared to delete in case it bricks it.
One bug I found: turn it on, don't select a radio station, but choose "Delete Preset" and it'll say "CANNOT EXECUTE".
The "zappin" button is purely annoying. AFAICT the idea is that you can easily find the song you want while not looking at the screen; it does this by playing the a ten-second sample of each song in order, and when you think "that's the song!" you hit "zappin" again and it starts playing that song from the beginning.
Haven't investigated firmware upgrade yet.
Oh, and the manual is online, but as an individual HTML file per page, rather than a single wgettable PDF. This is annoying.
Whew, all done. HTH, HAND &c.