Ottawa Canada Dear Suekosh:
The Victor reader family of DAISY cd players consist of one Walkman style unit and three larger units. I own a Victor Classic Plus which is comparable in size to an NLS four-track cassette player and can operate off of house current or its internal rechargeable battery. It has a Touch-Tone style keypad to skip back and forth in the book, lets you set place markers and has excellent sound quality. It can play DAISY, MP3, regular music format cds and a few other digital audio formats. The Victor Classic is like the Classic Plus but has a simplified keypad, not a Touch Tone style keypad so you cannot directly key in a page number you wish to go to but must use the forward and reverse keys. It does have a rechargeable battery though and the same excellent sound quality. There is also the Victor Classic Plus with recording. Note that it records to RAM and NOT to an actual cd like the Plextalk PTR-1 and PTR-2 do. I expect the Classic Plus with Recording also has excellent sound quality but have not tried one. While the Victor Readers can jump to a particular page number of a recorded DAISY book, it has been my experience that DAISY books intended for general reading do not have a page number index, so this feature does not work with them. It is my understanding that DAISY books intended for use as textbooks generally do have a page index so you can jump to a particular page of the book. DAISY books can have three or four levels of indexing, that is, Section, Chapter, items within chapters and phrase. A phrase is roughly one sentence. My Victor Classic Plus will operate roughly two hours on a full charge. The playback pitch and speed can be adjusted to play the book a bit faster or slower as desired and to change the pitch. The Victor Classic Readers have end-user upgradeable firmware. That is, if Humanware releases a new version of the machine's firmware, you do NOT need to send your unit in for updating, but merely insert a special CD into it that Humanware or your dealer would send you in the mail, press the start button and the unit announces it is updating its firmware, do NOT turn it off or unplug it. When the update is finished, the unit shuts itself off. Very simple and neat. While the Victor Readers are Humanware products, I'm not sure if discussions of them are on topic for this list or not. If you would like to discuss the Victor Readers or DAISY books generally, please write me off list at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This invitation to discuss the Victor Readers off list is open to anyone else who wishes to write me off list too. Thanks. Brian -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.9.5/376 - Release Date: 26/06/2006 ___ To leave the BrailleNote list, send a blank message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To view the list archives or change your preferences, visit http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote
