MP3 Reviews

I commend this player for being the first, but everything else about it isn't very good. It skips a lot, if you want to find a song at the end of the CD (alphabetical?), you have to skip through all the tracks one... at... a... time. Can't skip folders ect. Mine still works amazingly, but only because I just use it at home and never move it or even use it much. I've left non-rechargable batteries in the box while it's plugged in... BIG mistake! the stupid thing tried to recharge them and leaked battery acid (i think) all over the place. Get a different player, there's much better ones now.

I own one, and it has been the worst investment I have done in all my life. It takes too long to read the music files, after some use it heats up and will not work. Some cds are readable and others aren't. The cover painting is not very reliable. As a conclusion, it is a very low quality product.

The only reason for the 2 stars is because it was the first of it's kind. I bought this when it first came out, when there was no other MP3 cd players. It does work faily well. But as other reveiwers have suggested, the constructions is very cheap, the user interface is confusing and the battery life is short.

One great feature is the rechageable batteries. You can purchase rechargable batteries, and rechage them in the player.

Skip this purchase, and buy one the is newer.

i recently bought this and it's not very good you can sometimes hear the audio but if you even touch the soundfeeder the radio will go fuzzy

bought this item as i have an old car that doesn't have a cd player or tape player. the item worked ok for around an hour, then whatever i tuned the radio into, it couldn't find the adaptor. Tried on a radio in my house, and still couldn't find anything. Changed batteries. Sadly there is no indicator to show device is working. I would suggest spending another $10 and getting the irock device.

We bought this transmitter so we can have mp3's and web radio stations on our laptop play from the stereo. Before we had the laptop rigged with RCA cables into our stereo tuner which was very inconvenient. We researched and researched, even considered buying a whole new set up just to get our mp3's and web radio playing at a quality level. Well, the truth is, there isn't anything out there that fits our needs yet. This transmitter, for how cheap it is, worked on the first try and is great! After adjusting my iTunes equilizer the sound proved to be pretty good- better than I thought. I haven't used this in a car and don't plan to, but if you need a quick fix to get your computer music to your hi-fi, this is it! Don't spend ($) on that other expensive one.... this is all you need.

This cd mp3 player really excited me when I first opened it and tried it out(I bought it half price at a retail store). It supports mp3 long file name, and has a nice bluelit background display. Here is the problem: cheaply built. What happens is this cd player reads your mp3 cds no problem (takes 30 seconds to add up tracks, but not so bad at all) and then when you touch the door, i mean hardly even tap it!, or even if you, say, hold the cd player and walk--it will display a 'door open' reading. at which point it stops playing. and then you must push the door shut and it will then reread the cd. then you pick a track on the nice navigation menu (the menu is actually very cool) and it plays for another 30 secs to a min and repeats this process. what a shame. this player could have been great if it weren't for the manufactoring defect. spend a bit more, try another brand. all and all mp3 cd players can be great, this one is not. you get what you pay for, at least this time.

This cd player is the most horrible device i had ever bought. It cost me 50 dollars, and on the first drop, the thing broke, It took me around an hour to fix it. The mp3 cd player part of it dfoesnt work, and i have to punch it until my knuckles are sore half the time because it says "NO DISK"

Overall this does a good job but it skips portions of songs. Ever so often, using both CD and MP3, it will skip ahead a tiny amount and throws the beat in your head off. If I were to have the choice again I'd probably buy a competitor, but for the first CD/MP3 player I've bought it's okay.

A friend had the misfortune of buying this hunk of junk. She bragged to me about how much money she saved over buying an iPod. She finally gave it to Goodwill and spent the money for an iPod. She wasted 100 bucks.

So what was wrong?

First, she never could understand the cryptic menu system. Second the case was horribly made, it cracked in 3 places with fairly delicate handling.

Battery problems and other random button problems did not help.

If you are reading this review obviously you want advice, so here is mine....

Consider this review a coupon for 100 bucks off an iPod. You will just throw this thing away and buy a real product later so save the 100 bucks to begin with.

This product is total crap.. It messed up almost immediatly after I got it the buttons fell in and the screen blurred.. Don't buy it!

Let me start with the good things about the CHD500:

1) Price!! (beats the crap out of other HD drive based products)
2) Great for backing up stuff from u'r stuff and laptop with its large memory
3) Sound is good (when it does play) and the line out feature is cool

Now the bad things:

1) It freezes often
2) Baterry life sucks. I can barely get 1 hour after charging for 10 hours. (This might be a problem with just my player because I have read some good comments about the battery)
3) Navigation is way too complicated. Cannot create playlists on the go, cannot play songs at random, cannot browse for other songs when a song is playing
4) Takes a long time to load a new song

Bottom line: If I could turn back time, I will pay the extra $100 and go for an Ipod.

Also I've heard good things about the CHD1000.

System setup completed, but got an error message. "An Error Occurred" when channel auto setup completed. No help anywhere for this. No tech support to contact, except by email. Menu screen has option to watch TV, but when you press "OK" system just hangs. Have been working on it for 2 days, no success. I have a ReplayTV and so does my son, both work fine. We purchased this for our office, because of the price and integrated DVD player. Don't waste your money on one.

I think the title about says it all. I read many reviews before I bought, and I agree about the lousy remote and slow channel switch time. I could overlook all of that if the damn thing would just work.

The 1st one wouldn't let me delete a program I had recorded. RCA said "you can either live with it, or we can send you a new one". Live with it? They have no master reset or deltree type of command to reset these things. #2 worked for about 30 minutes then everything went green and stayed green. #3 wouldn't play my recorded DVD's where the 1st would. Now #4 has a recorded show "stuck" on the hard drive just like #1.

In addition to all of this every one of them has to be unplugged to "reset" them every couple of weeks because it will start getting "unknown error" messages when you try to record a show.

Be warned...........1 OK, 2 getting bad, 3 you must be joking, 4 take this piece of junk away!

I did a lot of reading, and there are a lot of people who were unsuccessful with this digital video recorder. I'm now pretty sure the failures were most likely user error.

I'm a long time RCA customer, with a fully integrated home theater, based on RCA's wonderful brand. I love having a true one remote (not macros) entertainment system. This component fits right in, and really enhances the quality of my Home Theater experience.

Anyway, this unit offered me the bonus of adding RCA's "Scenium" double-scan picture technology available in current model digital RCA big screen sets to my 2 year old 52 inch analog RCA MM52110 big screen. Wow....the quality of my Cox cable signals are now right up there with the off-air ATSC Digital signals I'm getting with my DTC-100 HDTV set-top.

I'm already a big fan of Guide+...works great here with Cox cable. I even watched a DVD movie in progressive scan (of course), and the quality is on par with my former JVC progressive scan player....but now I can watch DVD-R and DVD+R material that I'm creating with my own DV gear.

The digital TV recording seems to be working quite well. Even my wife was impressed....and that's a big deal. We even copied some of the family photos to the recorder via CD-R/JPEG. Works as advertised.

Kudos to Thompson...they did it right again (which is good, because the two different RCA 6100P DVD players I tried 2 years ago were garbage).

Let's go through the few pros before discussing the cons:
•It's small.
•It's an ergonomically sound shape, all things considered.
•It has a microphone.
•You can record to your iPod directly.
•I got it for really cheap.
•Useful when it works.
•Does not mess up on long recordings(22 minutes I have done without breaking a sweat, i.e. having to reset the 'pod).

Cons:
•Picks up a significant amount of sound when the iPod's hard disk spins. (Inevitable, but a bother.)
•Very low definition/low quality recordings.
•Freezes the iPod constantly, requiring a reset.
•Occasionally the iPod must be reset for it to turn on after using the recorder.
•High MSRP/SRP for what you get.
•Records to WAV.
•Distorted recording if it is sitting on my desk and I talk loudly into it(about two feet away).
•Does not do well with background noise(it picks up all of it and sounds terrible).
•Belkin cannot justify it being a bad quality device(phone support tells me that the only stipulation of the device is that it requires iPod firmware 2.1 or higher).
•Sometimes does not record.
•Sometimes says it's recording but actually isn't.
•Sometimes illuminates recording light when it isn't actually recording.

Okay, so WAV format I can deal with, but crappy recording quality I cannot deal with. Belkin, you have failed. Maybe it's just that it's difficult to make a functional, integrated voice recorder that's good quality... for the iPod. I don't hear great raves about the iTalk by Griffin, so maybe this is the case.

I bought this to use for recordings of my chorus rehearsal.
It froze the iPod.
It lacks the most basic automatic gain control, and clip-distorts anything above a quiet speaking voice.
Alas, I had it longer than 30 days to before I could fully test it.

Some useful lore, if you're one of the unfortunate souls stuck with this device:
Put a piece of cellophane tape over the condenser mike hole (not the speaker holes, the microphone hole.) That attenuates the sound so it's actually useful.

While you're using the device, keep poking at the menus so the iPod NEVER goes to sleep. That seems to prevent the hangups.

Belkin, if you're listening, this device is crap.

Although I experienced problems, I made several recordings that I am happy with before the Belkin iPod Voice Recorder finally broke. Along the way, however, it caused my iPod to freeze, necessitating frequent restarts. One particularly frustrating problem was it occasionally seemed to record fine while actually failing to record anything. Again, only a restart would solve this problem. Of course those problems might be software issues that Apple is responsible for. Nevertheless, Belkin are to blame for the worst problem of all. Finally, I had it attached to my iPod in my pocket, and when I took it out the voice recorder had broken off at the microphone plug. It is so fragile it can break just by simply inserting or removing it from an iPod. It seems Belkin are aware of how fragile it is since they include a protective plastic cover. But that's really a poor solution. The plastic cover only protects it when it's unplugged. And there's no reason it has to be so fragile to begin with. Ironically, since I was in China when it broke, I can't help but think the Belkin iPod Voice Recorder is like one of those cheap Chairman Mao watches that stops working soon after you buy it.

Oh, great. I get my Rio 600 / 32mb and add this 64mb backpack and now after 3 weeks the thing "quits working". Now I've had this player for over a year and it has been very good. Yes I've updated the software (1.55) and tried all the other tricks listed on the web... No go.... Now I read were I'm not the only person to run into this problem....

Great. So it's offered at $$$ but "can't be shipped outside the US". Is this bloody-mindedness or down to the fact that the charger would launch itself into space with our UK 230 volt supply voltage? (Who cares - I can buy a cheap charger here).

My alternative is to buy a "Backpack" from Amazon UK. But wait - it's only a 32Mb unit and the cost is *twice* that of the 64Mb unit!

Nah. I think I'll just buy a cheap Taiwanese MP3 player and trash this American junk. That seems to be the way the world is going.

Apparently, Sonicblue discontinued making this backpack for some time because it had a lot of problems-- the many serious issues were supposedly fixed.

Calibration worked easy. The only problem was the supposed 'charging lamp' didnt go on, which created a lot of confusion.

After calibration and testing, I had the battery drained and charged it up (because I thought the lamp didnt turn on because the battery was full)--It didnt go on. Battery level is entirely innacurate, and the mandatory rechargable battery doesnt last nearly as long as the ones I used before.

The only positive thing is that it works

With its bad history, my suggestion would be to buy a player from a reliable brand or one with better reviews.

Unless you really need the remote don't buy this junk. Even the remote is pretty useless. It has a two foot cord on it which begs me to ask the question "Couldn't you just as easily use the buttons on the player?" It also doesn't have a clip on it so if you're thinking of attaching it to something you best be prepared to slap some velcro on it. The cassette adapter is useless. I don't even know anyone with a cassette deck in their car anymore. The headphones are crap unless you like listening to just treble. No bass response at all. Turn the bass up on the player and you're listening to sweet overpowering distortion. The stereo cable can easily be found somewhere else. The car power adapter is a cheap, underpowered universal type. You'd be better off buying a 9v radio shack adapter with more mah.

The vendor took my money and failed to ship the product, which they now say is out of stock. However, there was no notification to me (during a one month wait) and no refund until I specifically wrote and asked what happened.

Send me a generic/universal car kit instead of real car kit and off course it did not work no contact # for customer service on their website. Goods arrived late. WORST POSSIBLE SHOPPING EXPERIENCE will not recommend to anybody

This product is aweful. It just absolutly refused to work in any of my cars. I tried it in a 2003 dodge van and it wouldn't even load correctly. i tried it in a 92 carolla... silence. i tried it my friends cars and it didn't work in any of theirs either. don't buy this. i wish i could give it zero stars.

This is horrible. The first one I bought has a very loud whirring and clicking when connecting an iPod in a Honda CRV. It was impossible to listen to the music. I returned it and swapped it for another, and the performance was identical. For an iPod in my car it is completely unusable.

So far, this has been working really well. I know people that have used others that have begun to fray and do not have very good sound. I suggest this one over the others most definitely!

From the day that I opened the box and took the reader, then plugged it into my computer I could never get it to work right. With a system running Windows XP it normally installs automatically then works like a charm. However, this time it installed but never functioned properly. It would dissappear then reappear at startup.
If you where lucky, it would stay long enough you to try to use it, then you could try to use it. It would then say there there was no card in the drive, then dissappear until next startup.
This also happened with the drivers on the CD. I would strongly avoid this product.

The Dazzle DM-8100 will not read my 128mb Lexar memory sticks. It will only read the 16mb Sony stick that came with my camera. I emailed customer service. With no response after 3 days I called their 800#. After quite a long wait on hold, they were of little help. They said there might be a patch someday. But, they did not know when.

I've had nothing but trouble with this reader. Claims to be XP compatable but XP rejects it and Dazzle customer support is useless at best. If you have XP stay away.