Slashdot Mirror
Review: Nex II CF MP3 Player
In digital photography, I've pretty much stuck with the CF-based Nikon Coolpix series of digital cameras, so I had scads of CF memory cards lying about. I also have an IBM Microdrive which I use when taking TIFFs using the Nikon. So I wanted an MP3 player able to handle not just Compact Flash, but also the Microdrive. The Microdrive is tricky because it both consumes much more power than solid-state CF cards, but also is slower to respond and larger, demanding the taller CF-II slot.
Until the i2go ego, there wasn't a mp3 player that could handle the Microdrive. I had owned and immediately given away the original, incredibly flawed, RCA Lyra because it simply stank so much I couldn't stand to own the thing. If RCA wants to send one of the new ones, I'd be pleased to check it out, but the shoddy original made me vow never to give RCA more MP3 player money.
The i2go ego (still sold some places, although I think the company that made it is defunct, look look here to see one) wasn't all bad. It played, and it acted as a pretty basic voice recorder, and it allowed for two CF cards to be inserted, at least if you bought a funny daughter board. But its build quality was such that it would spontaneously lose power if jostled. Also, it had the most annoying bug ever: the player would remember the card's contents from before, even if you changed said card's contents. It would try to play them too. It also -- at random --wouldn't notice songs that were on the card. It was very annoying, besides which it was enormous for an MP3 player.
I had been checking out the Nex II for a few months and with a long trip coming up, I decided I needed a MP3 player for the trip. I wanted to have a player that was smartly designed and able to run the microdrive. The Nex II seemed to fit the bill, so I ordered one (with a 256mb card included) for $239 (plus $15 shipping).
It arrived promptly 3 days after order from Frontier Labs' shop in Hong Kong; I've been using it for about a week now, and I have to say it's the best player I've ever owned. The display, an LCD (the letters are not blurry on the actual display) with a blue electro-luminescent backlight, is very readable, and the interface is super easy to use, with a rocker button on the right for track control above the volume buttons and the stop and the "fn" button on the left, under the headphone jack.
Conveniently, the Nex II also acts as a plain vanilla USB drive, so I can upload and download songs (or other files) under Linux with no problem. You can chose from two types of display while the song is playing (status or spectrographic display), which is fun. I stick with the status screen, which shows all pertinent information, including track length, quality in kbps, song title and time elapsed. The player has been able to handle any data rate I've thrown at it, and the specs says it can play WMA files, but I can't verify that. Also, I was able to pass the card to the camera and back with no problem, as neither the nikon nor the player are too controlling of the disk format.
Physically about the size of thick deck of playing cards, the Nex II allows you to change the color of the area around the LCD by sliding in thin colored pieces of glossy paper. You can buy more of these skins for $10, including the unfortunately named "mutant sperm" skin. It also comes with a snappy little neoprene case which has transparent portions covering the LCD and buttons so you can see what's up.
Despite all its good points, the Nex isn't perfect, it lacks some basic features, namely any sort of external power connector. You must always run it with 2 AA batteries. Mind you, it lasts 12 hours when using solid state CF and 5 when using a microdrive, so this is less inconvenient than it sounds. Also, the included headphones are not to my taste at all. The battery cover should be redesigned completely so the latches aren't as flimsy -- every time I change the batteries, I picture scotch tape in my future. Many would probably also like to see it be able to play Ogg Vorbis files, but that wasn't a deal breaker for me.
Another quirk of the Nex II is that to play Microdrives well, you need to load the 1.4(m) firmware available from the FrontierLabs website. It's odd that they didn't make this the default firmware, as the 1.4m firmware seems to work equally well with solid state cards and microdrives, while the firmware it ships with works poorly with microdrives.
So if you're looking for a decent mp3 player, you should check it out. The Nex II is an excellent value, and it sounds terrific.
I've had one of these players for many months and they are good. Some other features, not mentioned are:
- graphic equalizer (handy for tuning for headphones with no bass)
- spectrum display (as an alternative to the normal track display)
- CF is the best value per megabyte of any storage
On the negative side, the slot for the CF card is too deep and you can miss the pins if not careful.
The one I could lay hands on has no "shock" memory, it blips out for 30 seconds at the slightest bump. Have to be careful where you put it in the car, even on mostly smooth roads.
OTOH, the jog button is great, battery life with MP3s is better than 10 hours (get those green and white rechargeables with the yellow charger for $15 at Wally-World), and it does a beautiful job playing CDs, much better than my Sony CD player. Note - battery life is only 3 hours when you play CDs.
Sorry, but it get's an initial 10,000 points for the fact that you dump raw mp3's onto the Cf card and it will happily play them. NO OTHER MP3 PLAYER WILL DO THIS. Everything from sony has DRM,the entire Rio line has DRM (except the pmp-300 it was out before Diamond bent over for the RIAA) and I have tried every mp3 player that was removeable flash based storage at best buy/circuit city by bringing my own cf,mmc,smartmedia,memory stick,sd (copy of the mmc with drm abilities) loaded with 3 songs on each. Nothing would play them citing a bad format telling me that you must have it re-encoded and processed by the loader software to ensure you cant swap memory cards with your buddy. (as if ANYONE would do that. removable flash media is expensive, and the chances of finding a large pool of friends with the same mp3 player is near impossible unless you coordinate the purchase)
The iPod could be better, but I also dont see the point of carrying around 65 million mp3's I am quite happy with my 2 256Merg CF cards. and many times I never listen to 1/2 the music I am carrying... but then that is just me others might like the fact that they can sit through 3 meetings, 2 lunches, 4 bitching-out's by the boss, and 2 more meetings before hearing the same song again....
Now if they would make an MP3 boom-box... that way I can annoy those around me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There is a Yahoo Group for discussion of this player at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nexiimp3/
The Archos MP3 player has a 6Gig hard disk, and you just dump MP3 files onto it. It's also incredibly handy as a portable storage solution, as it mounts as a drive in Windows.
It uses USB, so it's not super fast, but it's fast enough for all my uses.
My Journal
mp3playerstore
has them for cheaper and super low shipping. That's where I got mine, and I see today that they are selling it for even less than before.... my luck I bought mine a month ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I didn't see this mentioned anywhere in the article or in another thread, so here we go. The base price (the player+accessories but no CF card) is only $109 directly from them! You can see all of the different options at their Yahoo! Store. it looks pretty neat, and if you combine this with the seemingly endless deals on Compact Flash cards that can be found (try AnandTech's Hot Deals Forum) this could be a great player.
-OctaneZ
Favorable at MP3.Com
Negative at CNET.COM
Brief at IGN FOR MEN (heh)
Mixed at Epinions
This is for all of you who don't have google-equipped browsers.
I have a riovolt. It's really great, the skip protection is amazing, you can switch it from 40 seconds to 100 seconds (only with MP3s) but 100 secs take up more power. It's got a great interface, supports folders, etc. And you can use CD-RWs. Which is a really great feature, because if you format it for packet writing you can dynamically take songs off and on as you like. It's also got upgradeable firmware. (Which is a great feature). My only problem with it is that sometimes MP3 CDs are really slow to load. It can be between 10 and 20 seconds after you press play for the you to hear music. Perhaps this is fixed in the latest firmware version, but I haven't upgraded in a while.
Mod this and parent down - offtopic.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
If I were a portable music device manufacturer, I would seriously look at this format as a possible option in future products.
However, the current Vorbis reference decoder uses floating-point math, which isn't available on cheap DSPs. As of yet, there isn't (to my knowledge) a fixed-point decoder for any Ogg format. This is the biggest thing holding up Ogg support on portable audio players.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I had owned and immediately given away the original, incredibly flawed, RCA Lyra because it simply stank so much I couldn't stand to own the thing. If RCA wants to send one of the new ones, I'd be pleased to check it out, but the shoddy original made me vow never to give RCA more MP3 player money.
RCA already has your MP3 player money, and there's little you can do about it. RCA's parent Thomson Multimedia administers the patent rights for MP3 technology and charges royalties to all manufacturers of hardware MP3 players.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have one of these things as well. Have had it for more than six months now... oh wait.. now.. THIS one I have had for only about 2. You see the build quality sucks. I love it because of the same reasons stated here (ie, acts as removable drive, no DRM, small, CF format). But the build quality really bugs me. My previous player died. Just wouldn't work. Mind you their tech support was helpful and I had a new unit (from Toronto, Canada to Hong Kong and back) in a week. My friend got one when he was in Hong Kong. Died in a month. Just won't turn on. The plastic is cheap and the battery removal process is cumbersome.
Some other negatives are:
- Plan to purchase "real" headphones as well. I have no idea what those "things" are that came with it.
- Audible "processor noise". That's about the only way I can describe it. The decoding is done by Software so when I first got my unit there was actual decoding "blips" but they fixed that in the 1.4 firmware... still not happy with the audio quality.
- damn thing doesn't remember last track played.
Pros are as mentioned earlier.
- Great battery life.
- FAT formatted CF Card and Microdrive. (I use an external USB CF reader to put stuff onto the card.
- Nice clear display.
- price
- support.
I recommend this unit for no other reason then to send a clear "up yours and your DRM" to the RIAA.
--- tracer.ca
It's half the size of a deck of cards, it runs for about ten hours on one AA battery, and it acts as a USB removeable drive just like your $239 unit.
The only difference is the price. I got mine here for $70 plus $5 shipping.
Add a 256mb flash card from Pricewatch for $80 and that brings the total to a measly $150 for a 256 MB mp3 player with zero copy protection, tiny size, and great sound.
Another kind of flashdrive MP3 player is the MelloMP3 unit. It's a little bigger and uses 2xAA batteries, but i got one for $60 for my brother for christmas.
Possibly the most interesting thing here is the compatibility of CompactFlash and IDE. If you do the wiring right you can stick a CF card straight onto an IDE cable with no other translation and it will work. So my idea for everyone, stick a hard drive under the seat of your car with a small power supply, then just hook the MP3 player to the car stereo via a Line In jack, and presto, you have a 30GB Car MP3 player for less than $200, plus you can take it with you.
Anyways, I hope someone finds this useful.
Muerte
I bought one of these and promptly traded it for an Ipod as soon as it was available.
.02,
The interface is good, the size is downright tiny, but the battery life is miserable. Perhaps the reviewer was using the 1GB microdrive, which actually has a lower RPM than the 340MB (which is what I'm using) and consequently gets a better battery life, but my NexII would last a max of 3 hours on 2 batteries.
Not only that, but when the battery starts to get low, the nex II experienced lockups and crashes. It was an extremely frustrating experience. All of this only applied to the microdrive - with a CF card, it worked great. But the whole reason I purchased it was for its microdrive support. I did everything their manuals and website suggested, but it didn't really help.
Oh, and another annoying thing - the "shuffle" feature will always sort the songs in the same order.
Just my
Matt
me@mzi.to
The sound quality is fine for a portable device of this size -- there is a slight hiss at low volume levels, apparently because they have a signal amplifier inline to make it able to reach a pretty loud volume. If you find it annoying (I don't even notice it except when i'm looking for it) you'll hate it, but I don't use a pocket MP3 player for my $800 headphone comparisons. Running or in a plane or wherever, its fine...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
This player is extremely popular with the Gold Wing motorcycling crowd (which I'm one of); many folks on the GL1800 list own them. Two observations come from motorcycle use:
For one, they are amazingly shock-resistant, even with the Microdrive. Be sure to get a 1G microdrive, and not a 340; the 340 pulls more power and is much less shock proof. Switching up to a 1G microdrive made all the difference; the player gets a good bouncing around in the fairing pocket, but no skips.
For two, the shuffle algorithm on this player needs help. The controls are a bit hard to operate with motorcycle gloves on, so most 'wingers just leave themselves to the mercy of the Shuffle setting. This thing likes to pick about 40% of the songs on the disk and cycle through them a few times before grabbing another 'chunk'. I'd much prefer the entire catalog be shuffled once (at the time Shuffle is selected) and then played through like a list that can be stopped and restarted. Only doing another 'shuffle' operation would change the order. Many MP3 players have this problem.
Other than those two comments, I dearly love this device. I got one w/o any CF cards for $79(!!), and threw away the headphones like everybody else. I share the Microdrives between the MP3 player and my Canon D30 digital SLR camera, and there are zero issues. It's fun being able to jam to great tunes on a ride, stop, swap to the D30 and take a few photos at a pretty vista, then put the microdrive back in the MP3 player and keep listenin'.
I'm surprised the reviewer didn't complain about my favorite NexII bug: It can't descend into subdirectories!
/Artist/Album/01-Song.mp3
If you store your music files on the CF card like this:
The NexII (with v1.4c firmware) CAN'T SEE any of your music. It will only search one directory level deep. So "/Album/01-Song.mp3" works fine.
It's not a big problem when you know about it, but it sucks when you forget to shuffle the files and find out only when you go to listen to them.
I've emailed Frontier Labs about this, and they are aware of the problem. I have hope that a future firmware release could do better. If it bothers you too, consider emailing them today.
I was considering buying the Nex II, but I did a dead stop when I saw the specs on their website.
0.5% distortion?! That is more than 10 times worse than all other MP3 players I've seen. I mean, it is really neat that I can use my Microdrive and my other CF cards, and that I can use it as a portable USB drive, but what is the point if the sound quality sucks?
A quick look at the reviews at mp3.com seems to indicate that the Nex II is OK when playing loud music, but the distortion becomes very annoying when playing more quiet music.
Did you really test this with something other than loud techno?
In fact, I bought two: one for my gf and one for me (to avoid those relationship damaging techno jealousy issues). The reviewer was right on target I think in every strength and weakness.
I've used mine with a W2K laptop as music depot and find that for reasons that may be generic to W2K or specific to my laptop, it bluescreens rather than properly dismounting the USB drive feature, but I have a CF-PCMICA adapter that works fine and is a lot faster.
I also get a lot more than 12 hours from a set of batteries: a lightly used set just lasted a 14.5 hour plane trip and are still going strong. This with the NCP 64MB flash card that came from dataviz.com (total price $99 incl. card).
Similarly I bought this player for it's CF+ (or CF type II) compatibility, and wouldn't consider any other media format.
An additional complaint I would raise is that there's no headroom to the amplifier. If you exceed the output it makes a very loud pop (for example on every drum beat). Use it with high db/mw (high efficiency) headphones if you like loud music. They should soft limit the output or use a better output amp.
Another feature would be to add a "resume play" mode so it picks up where it left off. I used it skiing and in some long lift lines it turned itself off from pause meaning I heard the first few songs of the card over and over. (Yeah, yeah, you can index through pretty easily but that's hard to do with gloves on.)
I also find the battery cover disturbingly dainty, and the case around the batteries frighteningly flexible. I'd suggest that they install a charge pump and let the thing recharge NiMh AA's off the USB source, which would take overnight.