MP3 on the cheap

I was curious about getting a Super Tangent (Apple Shuffle rip-off) as an el cheapo USB mp3 player. But no one seemed to be selling them on eBay anymore. In the search for the product under a different name, I stumbled on emanufacturer on eBay selling Visual Land’s imported mp3 players. They are bling bling generic asian electronics that one would see featured on dapreview. But, they were cheap. How cheap? Well, I purchased my VL-540 for 50 bucks (buggers charge 14 for shipping though). And just what did I get for 64 bucks?

A stick of red metal USB gum that holds and plays 1GB worth of music. Slightly bigger (3.5″ x 1.2″ x 0.4″) and heavier (if you can call 2oz heavy) than an Apple Shuffle, but the player has 96×26 pixel multicolor LCD. Multicolor? Yeah. Seems like every time you push a button the backlight changes color. Bling! (I later figured out how to set the LCD to one color) It seems to be a decent little player. It supports ID3 tags, lyrics (must be for the karaoke crowd), a voice recorder, and FM radio. Not too shabby for almost 100 bucks less than a shuffle.

The headphones if came with are quite el-cheapo, but I haven’t even bothered with them. I thought I would need them for FM, but my new pair of ER6i’s seems to work just fine as an antennae. Not so sure it would work with my grado sr60s though . How’s it sound? Not too badly. It isn’t going to top the sound quality of something like the Cowon iAudio X5L (which I lust after) but it seems to be quite accurate. It certainly isn’t muddy – I can instantly tell if an mp3 was recorded at 128k, or even 192k compared to my own anal retentive 32-320k VBR setting. It has some built in EQ modes, but I just have it set to normal. One interesting thing is that you can set the tempo – speed up or slow down the music.

The battery life seems to be around 8 or 9 hours and a charge takes a couple hours. One thing that is a bit of a pain is that the player has to be in the on position to charge from the USB port. So there is no way to charge the player without windows opening the drive as a storage device. Not a big deal, but a bit awkward. Of course, I could always get a USB charger, but I’m just lazy.

Though chip identifies itself as USB2, the transfer speed seems to be more on the USB1 side. I suspect the problem probably lies with the write speed of the flash memory. This means that filling the whole thing up at one time will take longer than I like. But I can’t see me doing a full purge and refresh of the player very often. The USB interface allows you to drag and drop files and folders, and the player’s screen lets you play by folder – making it much easier for me to work with than iTunes & playlists. I know, some people are big iTunes fans, but I couldn’t care less. Their implementation is much more trouble than it is worth if you already organize your music.

The UI is fairly uniform and intuitive once you figure out what buttons call what menus, and at what time – most of the menus of context sensitive. Navigating songs and folders is quite easy, and the radio implementation is well done. I tried some basic voice and radio recording and it seemed sufficient, but I haven’t explored it fully. As one might expect, the manual is pretty engrish heavy, but gets the job done. For some reason the player can’t play my copy of The Grey Album mp3s, but everything else I throw at it seems fine. I’m not sure what the problem is, they report as MPEG1 L3, so the player shouldn’t have a problem with them (Layer 1 or Layer 2 support is sketchy).

The player has some warts, but it seems to be a decent bit of a gear. How can you go wrong for a 1gb mp3 player with a screen for 64 bucks?

Now I just have to get a car deck that plays USB and SD cards. Or get/make an aux jack stereo. I guess I could always do the radio trip thingies, but they seem to get a bad rap.