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:
On 20 December 2012 17:53, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck(a)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.