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Computer Specials |
Xclef HD-500 MP3 Player (cont.)Setup: The HD-500 hooks up to the computer with the included USB cable. The user manual suggests using the AC adapter whenever the HD-500 is hooked to the computer because transferring data takes a lot of juice and you do not want the battery to die in the middle of file transfers. When plugged in and turned on, the player will install and show as a local drive. To move music files to the player, simply copy them into the player like you would copy files to an external drive. For organization sake, I highly recommend organizing audio files in folders, then moving the folders into the player. There are some folders already on the player: FIRMWARE, PLAYLIST, ENCODE, TEXTFILE, VOICE RECORD, and Sample. To upgrade the HD-500's firmware (which can be found at Xclef's site), simply place the firmware file in the FIRMWARE folder. The PLAYLIST folder is where you put all the Winamp created M3U playlist files. Playlist files placed anywhere else will not be recognized by the player. The ENCODE folder is where all the mp3s created by the player through radio or line-in is stored. The VOICE RECORD folder is where all the mp3s created by the player through the microphone are stored. Finally, the TEXTFILE folder is where you can place .txt files which the HD-500 can display on its 2.5" screen. Usage and Interface: To turn on the player, hold the play button for about three seconds until the welcome screen featuring a grinning mp3 player appears. A brief moment later, a loading bar will show at the bottom of the screen along with the capacity of the drive and the firmware version. Boot up time depends on how much data is stored on the player. With about 5GBs of music stored, the HD-500 took about 12 seconds to boot up.
The interface is very straight forward and easy to navigate. The manual only needs to be consulted if the user wants to learn all the gritty details about the HD-500. After boot up, the player will be in Browser mode. The first line features a row of icons, from the battery indicator to play modes. The second line in Browser mode shows the parent folder, while the five lines below show the contents within the folder in alphabetical order, folders first. The back and forward arrows, and/or the jog dial can be used to scroll through the folders and files. To play a file, scroll to it so that it is highlighted, then press play or press the jog dial in. Do the same thing to go into a folder.
In the file playing screen, the file name is displayed below the row of icons. If the file name is longer than the width of the screen, it will scroll across at a settable speed. Below the filename is the equalizer icon on the left and the volume indicator on the right. The sampling frequency and bit rate of the audio file is displayed below the equalizer icon. Playing time is displayed below the volume indicator. Between the bit rate and playing time is the play/pause status icon. Below that is the progress bar followed by the previous and next filenames. If the ID3 tag is enabled, the song's title will appear instead of the filename, and instead of the previous and next filenames, the Artist and Album, respectively, will be displayed. All this seems like a lot to squeeze into a screen, but its all there!
The HD-500 allows the user to create playlists, though they are called book marks. During the file playing screen, pushing and holding in the jog dial will bring up a Music Popup menu where things like book marking equalizer modes can be set.
The HD-500 provides two other modes of searching for files: Tree View and Search View. Pressing the menu button will toggle through the different modes. Tree View is a lot like Browser mode except instead of only having the same level folders listed, every level is listed in a branching manor with indents and "branches" indicating that a folder is the child of its parent.
Search View allows you to find audio files alphabetically by spelling out the first (up to) three letters of the file name. Letters that are non-existent on the drive will be skipped. Example, let's say you have no songs whose filename starts with C – E, then when you scroll through the letters it will go: A, B, F…. Holding down the MENU button will bring up the Major Modes Menu. There are seven major modes listed: Browser, Tuner, Encoding, Playlist, Text, Setup, and Exit. The Browser and Exit will both take you back to the Browser mode. Selecting Tuner will bring up the FM radio tuner. Encoding is where the voice recording, line-in and radio recordings are stored. Playlist is where all the playlists are stored. Text is where the .txt files are stored and can be viewed. Finally, the Setup Menu is where all HD-500’s configurations are set. To record from a line-in source, make sure no songs are playing. Plug an audio source into the player's line-in port and hold down record. A picture of a cassette tape will appear along with the elapsed recording time. Push the play button to pause while recording and push stop to stop the recording. To perform voice recordings, do the same thing except without anything plugged into the line-in. To record from the radio, do the same while in Tuner mode. To turn off the menu, press and hold the stop button. A Good Bye screen will show up with a picture of a googly eyed HD-500 and then a picture of a flat-lining HD-500. I found using the player to be very simple and convenient. It is rather big for just one hand to operate everything, but a lot of functions can be done with either the jog dial or the play, back, and forward buttons. The jog dial's tab sticks out quite a bit which sometimes leads to involuntary "jogging," I found myself accidentally scrolling the next and previous songs more often than I'd like. With that said, the jog dial works great when I am purposely browsing through huge lists of files and folders, even when the mp3 player is in its leather case. I found it rather inconvenient to have the volume buttons on the front sandwiched between two other buttons. I would prefer to have the volume buttons on the side.
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