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95 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Storm's a trooper, 10 May 2006
Swithering about an MP3 player? Chances are you, like me, will have exhaustively researched available players, until by now your nails are a shredded mess and you don't know your OGG from your WMA (or Apple Lossless, maaaaaaan). You will also have picked up on every piece of bad feedback, no matter how trivial - "I can't get it to sync with Media Player"; Lord give me strength - or useless - "The USB cord's too small" - until you're about round the bend. Relax: if you're in the market for a beautifully simple little MP3 player with a remarkable capacity (and if you seriously need more than 20gb, it's time to get a life), at an astonishing price, you've come to the right place. ATMT's Storm is just the dog's dangly bits. It's laughably easy to use: plug it in, press a button on the player and lo! your computer sees it as a separate hard drive. Double-click the pre-created Music_Me folder to create separate sub-genres (rock, jazz, pop, crap etc) the way you would create a new folder on your computer, then drag and drop your MP3 or WMA files into the appropriate bits. It's that easy. No, it won't sync with Windows Media Player but it doesn't need to; it's easier just to drag files from My Music or wherever you keep them on your computer, and plop them into the machine. Yes, the USB cord could be longer but as you can't do anything with the player when it's connected to your computer, so what? Mine sits on the floor! Of course, this is all secondary to the real meat and potatoes of any music player: what does it sound like? Ladies and gentlemen, be reassured: it sounds just great - and I speak as one who fearlessly encodes everything via WMA at a miserly 64 kbps just so I can squeeze more tunes on. Lest I be accused of bias, I have owned a Creative Zen and my children both have the dreaded iPods, and the ATMT is the equal of either. Yes, decent headphones help, but the in-ear jobs supplied are, for me, like any others of this type, ie serviceable; at home I use big Sony MDR-V300s and the quality is toe-curlingly good. Ditto playing it through my hi-fi (via a cheap splitter cable I found up the loft): I have compared the original CD with the Storm and the difference, for me, is negligible. The clincher is the price, and the shiny happy people at Amazon have trimmed a further fiver off the Storm since I bought mine three months ago, making it surely THE value 20gb MP3 player of the century. Yes there are niggles, like the daft wee plastic grey cover over the player's USB socket, but if you're going to let that put you off you're sadder than you thought. Solid and well-made, about the same size as a pack of cards, the Storm concentrates on doing the one thing you ask of any MP3 player: it plays all your music and plays it well.
PS: Other worries I've seen include: battery life (I'd say 12 hours on a single charge is realistic); styling - white, clean and utilitarian, just the way I like it; search facility - I've had no problems; random - when you're creating all your sub-genre folders, just create another folder within Music_Me (call it, say, Mi Tunes just to be naughty) into which you put all your sub-folders (rock, prog, etc). Put shuffle on, hit play and the Storm will serve up everything in there, upside down and back to front. Also, if you have shuffle on, you can play individual genres or even artists at random, which is a rare facility for a sub-£100 player. Gentle reader, I defy you to find a better player at this price - and one, moreover, which doesn't force you to use horrible proprietary software.
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