8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Maybe next year's model...
Date of Review: May 10, 2002
The Bottom Line: I would not recommend this unit because of the problems stated above. While it does have features as advertised, the other issues create too much of an inconvenience.
I travel a lot in my car for work, and normally lug around a CD case with 24 or so albums in it, in addition to my personal CD player. I was excited to purchase this product, because it will read both MP3s and CD-RWs, and figured I could just make a single CD-RW, and periodically rotate the songs on it.
The first problem I ran into was that neither Easy CD Creator nor the default Windows XP CD burning software can burn CD-RWs in a way that this CD will recognize, presumably because of the software overhead they use so you can write and re-write to the CD like a floppy. I had to purchase Nero instead, and then it was able to recognize the CD fine.
The second problem is that the only thing the CD displays on it is the track number--the artist, song, and album titles aren't displayed. When you have a CD with 150 and higher songs in it, it's very difficult to memorize that song number 96 is x and song number 87 is y. Especially when you're driving, and you can't look at a piece of paper that might have them all written down.
I also found that the skip protection, advertised at 45 seconds, had very poor quality. Frequently in the middle of a song, "hyperdrive" will engage--the song will start playing about 3 times its normal speed (this happened both with normal audio CDs and MP3 CDs). I've never experienced this problem with any other CD player I've owned.
Finally (more of a gripe than a real problem), the "Play" and "Skip" buttons have no discerning characteristics (different shape, etc.) from the rest of the buttons). This makes it difficult to skip forward to the next song without looking at the unit, which is a pain when you're driving at night.
