So I see an ad in the Daily Mail (newspaper…trust me, I do not buy it, it’s my in-laws) for Currys own brand Matsui MP3 player 2gb for £24.95. Too good to pass up me thinks. I have a 1.5gb MPman, but it has its own built-in battery, so it needs charging with its own charger. I hate that, so wanted to get one that takes 1 AAA battery. So I see the Matsui and think great, for that price I’ll have that. We go to Curry’s on Friday afternoon, in the pissing rain! Plenty of stock (just not on the shelf, so had to ask for it at the service counter). I checked that it indeed took a AAA battery, which it did, and bought it.
Get it home, test it. Already pre-loaded with some tracks, so was easy to test. Sounds OK for the price. Seems to be able to deal with varying bit rates, even tells you the bit rate of each track. Then I see what the major let down of the product is when I load some of my own tracks onto it! It doesn’t really have a proper folders/files structure, so it doesn’t create a list of albums/artists to play. There’s no folder hierarchy. Anyway, that slightly pisses me off. Some other people out there in Internet-land tried to rectify it by formatting the hard drive in the player, but then it stopped working all together. Other people just took it back to Currys to get their money back. I’m gonna keep min, but I’m going to dupe it by using software to change the ID3 tags (the code used to name mp3’s for players to recognise the songs). At the moment if I do nothing to the ID3 tags, the player will just be like a huge shuffled jukebox because it plays all the songs in alphabetical order. So I’m having to change the ID3 tags so all the songs are by artist first, so there’s a little bit of structure.
Nothing’s ever straight forward is it? Still, I suppose I can ask myself what do I expect for £25? I still would rather spend £25 on a Matsui system than £129 on an iPod. As much as I love Apple and Mac systems, I don’t think I would ever own an iPod, unless I won one.