onetonnemusic

Originally posted Jan 25, 2003 by funnel

The MuVo has a really simple method of uploading music to itself – you simply pull it apart and plug it into the USB port of your host system. The system recognizes it as another HDD and you can drag and drop your files straight onto it. It remembers the order in which you drag them, and when you start playback they are organized in the order in which you copied them. Simplicity itself!Copying is a little slower than we had expected, and it takes about 30 seconds per track, but this is nothing too troublesome. Eventually we’d like to see USB 2.0 support in future models of this drive (especially as higher capacity flash disks get cheaper) to facilitate quicker transfer speeds. You can also use it a simple flash HDD for file transfer of any type, which is safer option than a comparable zip disk, but with a few files on the drive, it wouldn’t leave a great deal of room for audio. The maximum size that creative release this model at is 128MB, which will also need to be improved in future models to be competitive.

Music playback is reasonably clear, and the supplied headphones deal out a reasonable amount of volume – enough for most listeners. The sound with the included headphones is nothing special, a little high-end biased, but that is to be expected with a smaller lower current draw device. It’s not a terribly dynamic sound, but this is also dependant on the quality of mp3’s place on the device, and the set of reference headphones that we use (Sennheiser HD-265 Linear) tend to a more flat response anyway. Other users have reported improvement with different headphones, but one would also presume that it would drain the batteries at a higher speed to plug in a pair of massive enclosed cans. Battery life is okay – a pair of AA’s lasted about 10(ish) 2 hour listening sessions, the serious user would probably want to get a set of rechargeable batteries also.

It has just a basic selection of buttons, the power button which doubles as a play / pause button has to be held on for a few seconds for the device to power on. A multicolour led indicates on/battery low/paused. The fast-forward and rewind buttons work in the usual way, with a quick press skipping the track and a long press tracking forward/behind within the same track. The skipping between tracks is not exactly instantaneous but it’s acceptable. It has a loop feature which allows you to repeat a track, or more interestingly repeat a section of a song. Quite handy for anyone wanting to nail a lick in a song or the like.

In the time we had to test the MuVo there were a few noticeable niggles which are worth a mention. Whether it was just our clumsy fingers or the other sweaty journalists who hand handled it, the metal-like finish on the play/pause button was already flaking off. The plastic below is thankfully a pleasant shade of grey, but it’s still pretty surprising for a device of this kind to so quickly get a chip in the finish.In another slightly stranger note, our testing reverie was interrupted by occasionally by random blocks of hard digital distortion. The only way to get it to go away was by separating the flash disk from the body of the player. This was odd, to say the least, we couldn’t reproduce it by replaying the same track over, and it seemed to happen on various mp3’s. In repeated listening sessions, it only happened 3 times in about 30 hours worth of listening, but its irritating, and tends to throw you out of the music listening mood (Unless you are into hardcore, in that case you probably won’t notice ;).

Overall, its quite a pleasant device to listen to, being a solid state player there is only so much that can go wrong with it, and I’d be fairly confident that ones that hadn’t been handled by a squllion grubby PC journalists wouldn’t display the slightly odd ”static” problem that we experienced. If anyone has used it and experienced it with theirs, let us know and we will revise our final rating. There are many other comparable products on the market for similar or lower prices – It’s hard to justify recommending this over them – certainly not with the odd behavior that we observed…

Price: $250/64MB $330/128MB
Verdict:
Quality: 3/5
Value: 3/5
Functionality: 4/5
Overall: 3.5/5
Distributor: Creative
Web: http://www.creative.com.au