Just got Karine a psa256max mp3 player. One of these "designed by Nike, built by Philips" things. Looks nice, sleek and light. Not only that all the accesories are in a similar design, from the headphones to battery charger. You even get two different straps with it, so it can be on your arm while jogging or on your waist.
Excellent sound too. Its even fast while switching from track to track.
So why is the title of this post "frustration"? Well, in a word: MusicMatch Jukebox.
If you use this device with the Mac it integrates with iTunes. On windows it uses MusicMatch Jukebox instead.
And it is possibly the worst player/ripper on the market today.
To start with the installer quits after 10 seconds. While you are making install choices it all of a sudden disappears without a trace. Poof!
After copying the installer from the CD first and then running it, it all of a sudden does work. So you start the program and insert a CD to rip. Then the next surprise: it cannot find the track information! Out of the 4 CDs I finally managed to rip I only got track info for one of them. Instead of giving proper error info, or a way to change which CDDA service it only gives an annoying popup-bubble suggesting I might not be connected to the internet! Right, and I'm the easter bunny!
This would be bad enough by itself, but next you find that the way you have to enter the track info sucks too. For instance the tracklist thingy doesn't work like a normal form-field. Most of the time it doesn't allow you paste (for some reason), tab works, but shift-tab doesn't, and in the album and artist fields tab, enter, etc. don't work at all. All this make entering lots of song-information HARD.
Finally you get all the music ripped (it artificially does this at a snails pace so you buy the "full" version) and then you're up for the next surprise: it completely ignores any artist and album info you enter before ripping. You have to add those AGAIN after you are done. Oh yeah, you then also have to rename all the mp3 files as well, as they will all be called "artist - xxxxx.mp3" with xxxx being the songname. "Artist" it exactly what it reads. Not the name of the artist but the word "artist". Strangely enough the program even has built in options to rename the mp3s for me. Why on earth doesn't it do this correctly the first time around?!
To make matters worse JukeBox seems to forget the track ordering! It will keep albums together, but inside the album it uses some weird sorting that results in all your tracks being out of order. If you then make the mistake of transferring them to the device (using another utterly confusing window with all sort of useless options) the order will be wrong on the device too! After hunting through the menus, the sidebar (another useless invention) and various other panels, knobs and twiddles you find a "manage" option which CAN sort the tracks correctly. You then have to put them into a playlist if you want the app to remember them.
There were countless other annoyances and flat out poor design-choices throughout. The incredibly unprofessional looking UI (looks like a below average submission to Skinz.com) doesn't improve matters either and don't get me started on stuttering playback. I don't get it: Why on earth does this have to so hard? Sure I can work it out in the end, but what about my girlfriend, who hasn't been working with computers for the last 21 years? She has to be able to do this herself, if she's to fully enjoy my gift. For her this will be utterly confusing from start to finish, meaning she will only learn what to click in what sequence. Any problems, errors, etc. along the way will mean she'll probably be lost as to what to do.
So, while I give thumbs up to Nike for the design and to Philips for building a solid product, both the people behind MusicMatch Jukebox and whomever decided to include it in this, otherwise excellent, bundle should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
