Since I’m spending 3 hours out of every day at the gym I’m listening to quite a bit more music, my lex & terry podcast doesn’t quite fill out the whole day anymore. This has lead to me delving into the depths of this device a little more than before. I have checked out a few different functions…some is good, some is bad.
The random function on this thing works a little different than I’ve seen in other devices. I’m not entirely sure when it determines the “random” order, but it seems to hold that order until you turn random off play a song (was a pod cast in my case) hook it up to the computer to transfer more music (pod cast in my case) listen to said podcast and turn random on again. What seems obvious is that when you hit shuffle, it determines and order and saves that list somewhere. When you add/remove files on the device it reads the file list, makes a change to the db and that causes the random order to be changed. It seems to me that with the zune I could turn random off then back on again to get a different random order. This is kind of a pain for me because I don’t always listen to music. I might listen to some music for a bit, then decide I want to rock out a podcast. When that finishes I might decide I want to listen to music again. When I go back to the music list and hit play, it starts at the beginning and plays the songs through the “random” list exactly like it had previously. I need to skip forward through the list a bit until I come to the point I left off (or after obviously). Even if I don’t hit play at the top of the list…I scroll down a bit, then hit play it will play the song I’m on…then run through the “random” list exactly as it did the last time. This is kind of a pain for me, but whatever. I can skip ahead.
The Walkman functions just like a usb drive when you hook it up to the computer. This allows you to drag and drop music to and from the device. That is a nice feature to have, but it also presents a problem. The Blackberry will ask, when you connect it to a computer, if you would like it to go into storage mode. If you chose no, it just charges off the usb cable and functions like it would without being attached. The Walkman ceases to function and is just a usb drive. You can’t listen to music while it is charging on the computer. This is kind of an issue for me as I’m listening to it 8hrs a day at the office. That is a perfect time to charge the device, but I’m not able to.
Building on that, the battery life on the sucker is perfect. I would bet I get 40ish hours if not slightly more on a full charge. I’ve never had it go dead on me, and I listen to it every day at the office. I might remember to plug it in to charge over the weekend, or maybe not…it’s battery life is really nice.
Something that urks me in general about mp3′s is that I cannot find a satisfactory comprehensive software package to handle my music library. I’ve bitched about this before, but to me this seems like a decent need that someone is not fulfilling. I’d even pay 50 bucks or so for a good software package that does all I want it to. I have not yet tried iTunes, and that might be my next move…but from what I’ve read that thing has it’s problems as well.