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156 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Superb Little Player, 3 Oct 2004
By A Customer
I was looking for something to replace my Discman, primarily to take to the gym, I was considering both hard-disc mp3 players and solid state ones. My main concern was the fixed storage space, with a CD or mini-disc player you can always increase your storage capacity. However, after some consideration I settled on the Creative MuVo 512mB solid state player and I must say I haven't been disappointed. The unit itself is tiny, even with the battery module it fits easily in the palm of my hand. I use the mp3 format for my music files, encoded at reasonably high quality, and can easily fit 10 albums on this player, more than enough for the gym! This player also plays .wma files which would let me fit around 20 albums, and although the greater compression means you take a hit on battery life it's easy to get/carry spares as it runs on one AAA battery. Since it only arrived yesterday I can't really comment on battery life but Creative claim upto 15 hours if you play mp3's or less for wma's. O.k. the storage space per £ is less than the 20-40Gb hard disc players, but then it's designed for a different purpose and is significantly smaller and lighter than probably any hard disc player. Having not used any other mp3 player I can't really offer any comparisons but sound quality is really good and the 5 band equalizer works well with 4 presets and one custom setting, plus the default. The supplied headphones give a good sound, only struggling if I cranked the base up, but don't fit well in my ears so I'll be replacing them soon. The supplied software is incredibly easy to use, although you can also just drag and drop files into the player using Windows Explorer as it acts as a removable Flash drive. The only time you need to use the Creative software is when transfering DRM protected .wma files. The player itself is also very easy to use, it only took a couple of minutes to familiarise myself with the menus. Playlist options on the player are limited, you have various types of repeat and shuffle options but if you want to play tracks in a particular order then you'll need to do a bit of clever file naming. One thing I especially like is that the player suppots folders, and as my PC music collection has a seperate folder for each album I simply copy across the entire folder and there is no danger of 'mixing' albums togeather and it's easy to move to the next album using the 'skip folders' menu option. The FM radio works ok although I guess this depends on the strength of the signal in the area, it's just a useful extra as far as I'm concerned. At £130 it's not cheap but it's still £100 less than an iPod or similar and comes with a belt clip 'case' and jogging armband included (unlike the mini-iPod). It seems to be well designed and constructed. I particularly like the way that it draws power through the usb port, either from the computer or when plugged into the battery unit, somehow that just seems a neat way of doing it. So, if you're looking for a neat Flash-based player with good sound quality and decent storage levels you could do worse that the MuVo TX. Obviously it's not going to keep your entire CD collection on it but with half a Gb of storage you won't be updating it every day.
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