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October 29 Productive day!I guess this should go in the "books" Category since the The Book of No Meaning is a book. *shrugs* ah well
Well anyway, yesterday was quite a productive day! I finally got the first 30 pages of the Book of No Meaning commited to a Word Document. Man that was a lot of typing. Only about 50 more pages to go though! So judging be how long it has taking so far, i should be done around 2008 sometime.
So do you want another quoteth from the Book Of No Meaning?
Ok, here you go:
From page 30, of The Book of No Meaning by RC (Richard Cartwright) Masterer
Adios amigos! October 08 Re-review of the Logik HDD40Well, I thought I should note down some of the developments, and problems, I have had with my Logik HDD40 music player after I praised it so much in my initial review. And this time I have pics!
Firstly, i've actually found a place where you can buy this player. RIGHT HERE at Micro Direct for an astonishingly low price of £41.11. About £30 cheaper than when I got it 10 months ago. Which also makes it THE largest capacity Digital Mobile Audio Player you can buy for under £50. And on a price divided by space basis it is also the cheapest DMAP in the <6GB category.
Not even being pipped by the Rio Carbon found on the same site.
It also comes with 64 free songs from MD. Which, I'm assuming, come from the same source as the 60 that came with it when i bought mine, namely PulseRated.com. Some of them you will find crap, obviously being all unsigned artists, but I actually found quite a few tracks that I liked a lot so it deffinately sweetens the deal.
There is also a Logik HDD60 which has, you guessed it, 6GB of storage space. But this one tends to retail for a lot more, in the £130 -160 category usually. For that price, there are a lot of other options, so I personally wouldn't recommend getting that one straight away.
The player
It certainly is small, as you can see from one of the pics it easily fits in the palm of my hand. I think it uses either a 1.5" or 1" Hard disk drive.
On one side, it has the skip forward, skip back, select, menu/back, and play/pause buttons. Very useful, very functional. If you hold in the skip forward/back buttons while playing a song you can fast-forward or rewind the currect song. Handy if you just want to get to the guitar solo. However, these buttons do have a tendency to feel a little loose, and the 'click' of them doesn't feel right on many of the buttons.
On the other side or the player, is the on/off hold buttton, and the volume up/down buttons. The on/of switch is a actually a little slider, which you hold down for a few seconds to turn the player on, then flick up to the hold position to stop any accidental track skips etc. I should mention that this is the component that broke on my original HDD33, which is sort of telling of the build qualiy. And the volume up/down buttons (two separate buttons, one for volume up, one for volume down) do exactly what they say on the tin; change volume up and down.
The back of the player is entirely plain, save for a small sticker with a few details on. The front has a small black and white LCD display with a nice blue backlight. Which is all you really need, and you can see fine on it.
The top of the player has the headphone jack, the 5V DC power plug, and the mini-usb cable connector. All very functional. On the bottom of the player however, comes a little surprise, a microphone. With it, you can record dictation, or, well, any sound you want. Obviously sound quality out of it isn't awesome, but it does the job, and is a feature in its own right.
Now, looks. It is predominately made out of this really nice brushed aluminum, with strong, hard, black plasic around the sides. It originally had 'LOGIK' in what originally appeared to be metal embossing on the fron as well. But this turned out to just be small bits of shiny plastic glued to the front which feel off after a bit of use. Quite dissapointing really, but it does make the front of the player quite smooth and uncluttered after they come off. I'd probably recomend trying to peal them off yourself (assuming later versions still have them jsut glued on) rather than having the hassel of having them fall off mid-use.
Functionality
For a player of this size and price, its actually surprisingly well featured. Though, not all the features work 100% how you want them to.
For starters it plays both .mp3 and .wma file formats with ease. I'm not sure about .wav as i've never tried, and the manual doesn't explicitly state that it does. WMA it can play anything from 16Kb to 192Kb/s a second well. And with .mp3 it can do 192Kb/sec as well easily, and i assume can play up to 320Kb/sec files, though i have never tested this (i really should sometime :) ). Lossless formats, i have never tried, and you would probably be just wasting space anyway.
You can also use it as an external USB harddrive if you wish. with the 4GB of space it performs quite will in that area. However, one dampener on this is that it inexplicably cannot be powered through the USB drive. And, being a HDD, chews up the power very rapidly. So you are wise to also plug in the mains adapter as well if you are trasnfering files. One thing I should note here is that the player gets VERY VERY hot when transferring files for more than about 5 minutes. The metallic part of the player becomes especially hot, however, this does not seem to damage the player in anyway.
You can transferring files either manually, using windows explorer, via Windows Media Player or some other media player, or via the supplied 'Jukebox management tool.' But any way you do it, you'll have to build the data base of songs with the supplied software so you can browse by artist, album etc. I have never got it to satisfactorily work with WMP.
When you have all the files onto your player (and databases built) you can search for your music by either artist, album, year, genre, playlists, or by song name. You can also just go into an 'explorer' and just search manually for the song you want.
It also has a battery level indicator, vol level indicator, play mode indicator (random, sequence etc) and a clock, all onscreen. You can change a number of settings on the player including language, lcd contrast, play options, date/time, record quality (i'll get to that later) and most importantly EQ setting. It has a robust set of EQ setting for most genres and it works well.
Next, as i mentioned, you can record voice via the microphone, with variable quality settings. AND you can also record from any device with a headphone out with a line-in cable (supplied). Extremely useful if you, say, don't have a PC at home. You can simply pop your CDs in your CD player and record the songs direct to you MP3 player via the line-in.
Finally, you can 'book mark' where you got to in a track so that when you turn it back on you can pick up right where you left off. A useful feature that i personally haven't really used very often. Oh, and it also automatically remembers your volume setting each time you turn it off.
Noise
Well, what good is a music player if it sounds like crap huh? None at all. Fortunately, the Logik HDD40 doesn't dissappoint. With all the songs and headphones i've tested so far, sound quality just gets better and better with better with better quality headphones. With my player, there has been an issue where one of the connectors in the headphone jack has become bent and often the left channel doesn't play. But when it does work, its AWESOME!
Conclusion
OK, the Logik HDD40 has had some issues, some of them quite annoying, but lets face it. For the same price I point out above, you aren't going to get more space or features anywhere, not for a while. So for the money, its worth it. But if you want total reliability, and ease of use, i'd say look elsewhere. But if you are willing to work around some bugs (some of them likely only confined to a small number of players) it is very good value for money.
A buy, with a few reservations. :)
Adios! |
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