I've been on the market for a nice MP3/FLAC player since my beloved Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox firmware gave up the ghost. I had read some good reviews of the M3, so I took the gamble.
When I unpack it, I hold a feather-light sturdy little device in my hands, not bigger than a box of matches, which looks very professionally made.
"Built for music and happy", is what greets me when I boot up the M3, which gives me good hope. 'Built by music freaks', it makes me think. The screen looks usable enough, not beautiful, but usable. The buttons feel workable enough, if a little wobbly and maybe I need to press twice every now and again to make it actually register, but really, as long as they work, I'm really quite OK with them, especially considering the affordable price.
I load up my new 64 GB card half-full with music. I insert the card into the shiny M3. It immediately starts scanning, which is what I want, so, excellent. I navigate the menu; not one option is labeled with text, so it takes some guess-work to get where you need to go. The Asian serif font is not great for the small screen, but still, it works, so it's really OK.
This is where the disappointment starts. The labels in the artist and album lists are truncated at seemingly random places. "Aphex Twi", "Boards o", ... I know what is what, but it really doesn't fill me with happy. What's worse, way worse, is that the list isn't sorted alphabetically, but according to the order in which it was found on disk. This does make it very difficult to find what you want, especially with 64 GB of music.
For some artists, it filed only 3 of the artist's 10 albums under the artist's name, so often times, you'll have to rely on the folder structure, because the album just wasn't indexed at all.
Time to play some music. The sound is really good, even on my cheap Sennheiser MX270 earbuds. I couldn't wish for more, again, especially considering the reasonable price. I'm sure it will sound amazing on better head gear. Although, I find out it doesn't respect the track numbers. It starts at track 3, then track 5, then track 1, and so on. It's random. At this point, regardless of the technical sound quality, this severely reduces the musical quality. Many albums are meant to be enjoyed in one particular order, this is why we record the track number as metadata into the digital audio file.
This is really where I've given up on this promising device...
Sound-wise, considering the reasonable price, this is an excellent music player, but as of firmware version 1.17, it just isn't, because it really needs some usability and outright bug fixes.
When I unpack it, I hold a feather-light sturdy little device in my hands, not bigger than a box of matches, which looks very professionally made.
"Built for music and happy", is what greets me when I boot up the M3, which gives me good hope. 'Built by music freaks', it makes me think. The screen looks usable enough, not beautiful, but usable. The buttons feel workable enough, if a little wobbly and maybe I need to press twice every now and again to make it actually register, but really, as long as they work, I'm really quite OK with them, especially considering the affordable price.
I load up my new 64 GB card half-full with music. I insert the card into the shiny M3. It immediately starts scanning, which is what I want, so, excellent. I navigate the menu; not one option is labeled with text, so it takes some guess-work to get where you need to go. The Asian serif font is not great for the small screen, but still, it works, so it's really OK.
This is where the disappointment starts. The labels in the artist and album lists are truncated at seemingly random places. "Aphex Twi", "Boards o", ... I know what is what, but it really doesn't fill me with happy. What's worse, way worse, is that the list isn't sorted alphabetically, but according to the order in which it was found on disk. This does make it very difficult to find what you want, especially with 64 GB of music.
For some artists, it filed only 3 of the artist's 10 albums under the artist's name, so often times, you'll have to rely on the folder structure, because the album just wasn't indexed at all.
Time to play some music. The sound is really good, even on my cheap Sennheiser MX270 earbuds. I couldn't wish for more, again, especially considering the reasonable price. I'm sure it will sound amazing on better head gear. Although, I find out it doesn't respect the track numbers. It starts at track 3, then track 5, then track 1, and so on. It's random. At this point, regardless of the technical sound quality, this severely reduces the musical quality. Many albums are meant to be enjoyed in one particular order, this is why we record the track number as metadata into the digital audio file.
This is really where I've given up on this promising device...
Sound-wise, considering the reasonable price, this is an excellent music player, but as of firmware version 1.17, it just isn't, because it really needs some usability and outright bug fixes.
