Quote:
Originally Posted by Biggy
I'm willing to spend a bit more on reliability, how long have you guys had the dell? That seems like a really good value for the price. Only real negative thing i've heard is that if you play a playlist, it will stop with the song you select and wait till you tell it to play another one. Is that true?
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I've had a DJ for a couple of months. The first one quickly developed a heaphone jack problem. The second has worked fine, other than exactly one hard drive lockup when I was running to an appointment on concrete and had my DJ jostling in the case on my hip - quickly fixed with a reset.
If you look at the Dell DJ support forums and delldjsite.com, you'll notice 3 main types of reliability problems: (1) hd crashes, (2) headphone jack problems, and (3) software difficulties.
As for (1) and (2), I get the sense the DJ doesn't have the rabid Internet fan following of some of the other players, so it's hard to tell how pervasive these issues are, or whether they're part of the normal, par for the course issues that all of these players have. Regardless, Dell has a secret weapon - its warranty. First, the basic warranty is a full year. Second, if something goes wrong, they ship you a new one immediately in an "advanced exchange." You return the defective one in the box the new one came in. No RMAs, waiting for repairs, waiting for replacement stock, or arguments (usually - you may have to to email the service rep in India back and forth a couple of times while they satisfy themselves you can't fix it with something on their script). You can buy a second year of the warranty, or "accidental breakage" coverage, for a small price. (Or rely on your credit card coverage to double the warranty.)
As for the software issues, I think those are more consumer confusion over options than anything else. Dell gives you MusicMatch, which you can use for all of the usual functions as well as transferring tracks to the DJ, and DJ Explorer, which you also can use for transferring tracks to the DJ and editing the tag database on the DJ. You can also buy Dudebox for $25 to transfer, edit, synch, and stream music over your home network. For someone on this forum, they probably won't be very confused about what functions they want to use which piece of software for. I actually like MM for ripping and tagging, but its transfer features are clunky. I bought Dudebox, which I like, but if I had it to do over again I'd probably try out DJ Explorer first.
I've never heard about the playlist bug you mention - I just set up an on the fly playlist and it didn't behave that way. Most folks are using the previous version of the player firmware - a new version just came out that's needed to support the new FM remote, but for some people it has caused random problems. There is at least one other minor firmware bug I know of - if you are set to random play mode, then play all tracks, and you have any albums whose name begins with a symbol rather than a letter, the first "random" track will always come from one of those albums. I know that Dell monitors the firmware complaints - in the last major upgrade they addressed the most prominent issues, and I can only assume they'll do so again.
I hope this helps. Good luck in your choice.