> I've just bought myself an Omnifi DMP1 > > http://www.omnifimedia.com/products/omnifi_details.jsp?productId=12541 > > I haven't installed it yet but I have been geeky enough to bring a battery > in off my car and listen to it on my home stereo. > > It seems to be a great bit of kit apart from it has only got a 20GB disk. > I reckon it will only be a laptop hard disk though so it will probably > upgrade ok. Of course it might not be...I haven't got round to taking it > apart yet.
I've had a DMP1 for a few months now and have been quite happy with it (esp. considering the price I found it for: $117!). Overall it's a pretty good machine but there are a few issues that one ought to be aware of (listed in order of egregiousness): 1. There are no fast-forward or rewind controls, just skip forward and skip back (this is mainly a problem when you're listening to audio books or other long tracks) 2. It has a tendency to lock up when you quickly execute transport controls backwards then forwards (once you get used to it this isn't such a big deal, just be slow and gentle with it). Overall the device is fairly slow and sluggish. 3. The software it comes with (simplecenter) is a beast of a java app, completely devoid of features and options, and is terrible about updating its tag database when changes are made. Sometimes it takes moving files out of your music folder then back in for it to recognize changes. It also has a 10,000 song limit (which is thankfully defeatable via a hack you can find on the very useful omnifi forum on yahoo). There are some other pieces of software which people are trying to develop to replace simplecenter but I haven't found any that are really useful yet. 4. It's not nearly as flexible as a squeezebox when it comes to on-the-fly playlist creation. There's a crude and awkward way to create a 20-song custom playlist in the car, but you're pretty much limited to playing saved playlists, or entire genres, or an entire album, or an entire artist's work--and no combination of the above. 5. The only info available about a currently playing track is track title and artist. This feels so limiting after being spoiled by my squeezebox. 6. I use the wireless adapter to sync from my computer in the middle of the night and whenever a wireless sync occurs the "resume" position is lost so that when I turn my car back on I have to queue up my music again. Despite those shortcomings, I still find it incredibly enjoyable to have my entire music collection available to me in my car. FYI, the hard-drive is simple a laptop drive and can be upgraded--there are sites out there that provide detailed instructions on how to do this. People have even had success adding an external usb drive to the setup (the car's hard-drive enclosure has a couple of usb ports on it). While there seems to be no more development on this product from the manufacturer they at least still do answer the phone on their support line and I was impressed how helpful they were when I called them. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
