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Haier Rhapsody Ibiza

Michael Brown — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:30:46 -0600

When talk turns to digital media players, Apple’s iPod and Microsoft’s second-generation Zune (with its third-gen firmware) dominate the conversation. But if you’re a Rhapsody-to-Go subscriber ($15 per month), there’s only one media player you should consider: Haier’s Rhapsody Ibiza.

The Ibiza is available in three configurations: flash memory models with 4GB and 8GB capacities (priced at $200 and $230, respectively) and the 30GB hard-drive model ($300) reviewed here. All three play videos and display digital photos as well as play music; they also support Bluetooth headphones.

The Ibiza can connect to 802.11g Wi-Fi networks, which means you can stream and download songs from Rhapsody (and listen to Rhapsody’s Internet radio channels) without plugging the player into your PC. Synchronizing the Ibiza to your PC, on the other hand, requires a hard-wired connection.

This device leverages everything that we like about the Rhapsody service. If you’re online while listening to a song, for instance, a menu displayed next to the album art gives you the choice of downloading the track (or the entire album) to the player, purchasing and downloading the song or album to the player, sampling other tracks from the album, or calling up a biography of the artist. Choose “more by this artist” and the player will open a submenu with choices that include an artist sampler, a list of all the albums the artist has recorded, a “top tracks” list, and a list of similar artists.

The Ibiza’s software is excellent—in stark contrast to Rhapsody’s absolutely dreadful PC software—but we do have one complaint: Drill deep down into its nested menus and the only way to get back to the home screen is to repeatedly stab the back button.

“Tethered” tracks, of course, remain available only as long as you maintain your subscription, but we’re disappointed that the player doesn’t inform you whether the tracks you purchase are infested with DRM (Rhapsody sells both encrypted and DRM-free tracks).

The Ibiza is close to being the perfect portable companion for Rhapsody customers, but there’s very little to recommend to folks outside that circle. Its total lack of support for lossless audio codecs, meanwhile, is a major disappointment.

SanDisk Introduces Competition for the Compact Disc

Florence Ion — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:20:52 -0500

SanDisk is teaming up with major music labels, including Sony BMG, to offer “slotMusic”; 1GB memory cards preloaded with full length albums.

The albums will be sold at retailers likes Wal-Mart and Best Buy and will be encoded in high quality mp3 format. The microSD cards will have no DRM restrictions, allowing the music to be easily downloaded to a computer or loaded onto an mp3 player. SanDisk also anticipates that be offering 1GB cards, artists will take the liberty of offering more than just an average 11-track album, maybe even venturing to offer music videos, interviews, album art, bonus tracks, and other premium content.

This business venture is an interesting one, especially considering that SanDisk seems to be attempting to revive physical media. This could prove to be a difficult endeavor, especially with companies like Apple being ahead of the game with iTunes. There’s speculation that this is SanDisk’s way of trying to offset the takeover bids from Samsung and Toshiba, though analysts say there is little the company can do to try to stay independent.

Toshiba Gigabeat T400 Media Player

Michael Brown — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:17:51 -0600

It’s taken many a year, but Microsoft is finally figuring out how to build operating systems for handheld devices. Windows Mobile Portable Media Center 2.0, embedded in Toshiba’s Gigabeat T400 4GB digital media player, is better than anything Apple has to offer.

We’ve grown so accustomed to the iPod’s touch wheel that we didn’t think any other type of design could be as effective for browsing. But the Gigabeat’s crossbar (Toshiba calls it a PlusPad) and four-square button configuration are remarkably effective for navigating menus on the T400’s large 2.4-inch LCD. The device is also extremely easy to use with either hand.

Media Center Mobile looks and feels just like the big-screen version of the OS. Pressing the button with the familiar Windows icon brings up the main menu from which you can choose listings for TV, music, pictures, or video. Use the crossbar to move the selector to My Music, press OK, and you get a listing of your music sorted by artist, genre, album, song, or playlist. Toshiba recommends using Windows Media Player 10 or 11 to copy music to the player and create playlists, but you can also create a “quicklist” using nothing more than the player.

Although Microsoft’s PlaysForSure program has pulled a disappearing act, we had no problem syncing the player to our Rhapsody account and copying protected subscription tracks to the player. But what’s really exciting is that the device supports Microsoft’s WMA Lossless format—a rarity among portable media players of all stripes. The T400 sounds great with tracks encoded with both lossy algorithms, but it’s utterly fantastic with losslessly encoded music.

As much as we hate accepting trade-offs, we’re going to let the T400 bump SanDisk’s Sansa Connect from our Best of the Best list. The T400 doesn’t offer Wi-Fi support, but it does provide a bigger screen, a better user interface, and support for WMA Lossless. Here’s hoping Toshiba decides to build a version with a hard disk (and adds support for FLAC while they’re at it!).