Simon Still: I'm with you on this overabundance of flash memory formats. I'd like it if my camera and MP3 player used the same, but alas it is xD and SD. I'm sure if I get a third device I'll have a third format with which to contend.
More about the LDP200. First, cost. It's ludicrously cheap. You can get the version without a bundled SD card for less than US$40, and you can pick up SD cards (not necessarily Lexar of course) for about $50-$60 per GB. As with anything, I'd hate to lose it or have it stolen, but if that happens I'll feel a lot better than if I lost an iPod. But yes, there are drawbacks, mainly surrounding its no-frills design. First, the *only* method for browsing music is to browse the directory structure you create on the SD card. If you just dump all your files into the root directory, good luck. I personally organize everything in an ~/Artist/Album/00 - Track.mp3 structure so this is no problem for me. Sometimes, I think it would be nice if there were a search function, but I'm mostly a full album listener so again for me it's not a big deal. For the most part when browsing this directory structure, it organizes alphabetically. However, I noticed once (and haven't experimented more to determine if it's consistent) that it placed Rob Dougan's "Furious Angel's (Disc 2)" before "... (Disc 2)". This is irritating, but if it's consistent (again I haven't experimented), I can live with it. The center control stick *feels* cheap, like I might just break it one day. I'm usually careful with things and perhaps the control stick is tougher than it appears, so hopefully this won't happen. When you turn the unit turned on after being turned off in the middle of playback, it remembers the track you were playing and starts there, but from the beginning of the track. It doesn't remember the time index within the track. It has shuffle and repeat functions, but they operate over all the music on the SD card. This is fine as an option, but I wish there were also an option to shuffle/repeat just for a particular folder (which in my case always represent albums). No Ogg Vorbis support. (This was supposed to be supported in their LDP 800, which never materialized, pushing me back toward MP3 and this player.) The display (which is easy to read and well backlit) insists on scrolling the track title, even when the title is well short enough to fit the width of the display. The display only shows the track title. There is simply no way to display the artist, album, track number, year, or any other data in the tags. This would be less of an issue to me if the display space available were simply limited, but it is actually quite large. Unfortunately, the designers just made, IMO, poor use of the space. They sacrifice display of things that might interest me as listed above for display of information that I just don't care about: The file format (MP3 or WMA), the bitrate, the sampling frequency (!), as well as a couple of static "icons" whose purpose I have not yet been able to divine. I also don't really need to see at a glance the volume level display, as I can hear it. Although it displays the time index for the track currently playing (updated every second) it would be nice to know the length of the currently playing track. Yes, I'm extraordinarily picky. As I said though, all of these are *minor* qualms. Overall it's a great basic player. Still, I'll bet that if Slim Devices made a portable it wouldn't have any of these problems... :) -- eq72521 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eq72521's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1512 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18910 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
