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- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 23 reviews Back to product review
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
2.5 stars
"The Uhaul of digital players"
Pros: big HD, lots of features
Cons: Hard to sort 100 GB of music
Summary: It?s big. It?s ugly. It?s hard to handle. It holds a boat-load. If you want something sleek and stylish, this is not your best option. This thing is built for one purpose: to hold a ton of files. It?s not meant to be pretty or easy to use. If you can get over that, then you?ll like the Xclef.
Obviously the best thing about the Xclef is the 100 GB (100 billion bytes, which is 93.1GB in actuality) of storage. This is more than enough to hold just about anyone?s CD collection with room to spare.
The problem is that DMC has not made it easy to find the file(s) you need. Since the Xclef holds 100 GB of songs or other data, DMC should have expected people to actually fill the thing up with a ton of stuff. However, they didn?t design the Xclef?s interface to facilitate searching though a lot of folders, subfolders, and files that 100 GB of data would entail.
If you factor in the very user-UNfriendly way the Xclef handles playlists, it makes controlling your Xclef doubly tough. For file-hoarder types (like the people who?d be interested in the Xclef), setting up playlists ahead of time is one of the best ways to hear exactly what you want (and not some of that stuff your archived just for the heck of it, as file-hoarders tend to do). The more files you have in your archive, the more vital playlists become.
So you?d think that DMC would place a lot of emphasis on the use of playlists with a 100 GB mp3 player. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You can?t create playlists with this unit (you have to connect it to a computer and use WinAmp). Not only that, the Xclef treats playlists as a completely separate ?mode? of operation from the normal playback mode (which DMC calls ?Browser Mode?). This wouldn?t be a big deal, except that when you crank the Xclef up, it automatically goes straight to Browser Mode (apparently you cannot change this in the Setup menu). This makes it impossible to use the ?resume? feature in a playlist if you turn the unit off and back on again. You have to go back into ?Playlist Mode? and completely restart the playlist from the beginning.
An additional nuisance: the separation of ?Playlist Mode? and normal ?Browser Mode? makes it impossible to ?shuffle? a playlist. You can start at the beginning of a playlist and manually skip around within it, but you cannot just put the playlist on ?random;? shuffle play only works in Browser Mode. Sure, you could shuffle your playlist manually using WinAmp on your computer, but whenever you start the playlist on the Xclef, you?ll hear them in the same order every time.
Basically the Xclef gives you two choices for shuffle play: shuffle between songs within a certain folder in the Xclef, or shuffle ALL the songs on the Xclef (100 GB here, remember!!!). You cannot limit a shuffle play session to a certain artist or a certain genre. This is a major drawback for some people, seeing as how shuffle play was a big enough deal for the Zen Touch and fourth-generation iPod to have dedicated ?shuffle? buttons.
Other strange quirks . . . Even though the Xclef plays Windows Media audio files (.wma), it doesn?t recognize playlists created in Windows Media Player? only lists created using WinAmp. Also, the manual says to plug the Xclef in to AC power while connected to USB (supposedly to prevent data loss in case the batteries run out while the drive is spinning), and yet the unit doesn?t actually recharge while the USB cable?s connected.
To keep myself sane when searching for songs I need, I keep the Xclef plugged into my computer and use Windows Media Player instead of the unit?s convoluted playback interface. So basically, I?ve learned to treat the Xclef like a compact external hard drive that can- if needed- play audio files. If you?re going to do that, though, you might as well save your money and buy an actual external hard drive.Updated
I was disappointed to learn that in order to use the Xclef, it has to be running on battery power. When it's on AC power, a charging screen comes up, and you can't actually "do" anything with the unit except let it sit there and charge. I'm not sure what kind of battery it has, but the manual said something about letting the unit discharge fully before trying to recharge it (reminding me of early cell phone batteries we all used to have), so I've been really careful to never plug in the AC adapter unless it's completely dead, for fear of killing battery life.
- 2 replies to this review
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I've had my 80gb XCLEF-HD500 for 2 years with no problems.
Pros
Large hard drive for large collections. I have my entire 400+ CD collection ripped with LAME & OGG Vorbis.
Wide file format support MP3, WMA, OGG, VBR-MP3, VBR-WMA. You don't need I-Tunes to re-format it in AAC.
No software is required to load the player (I-Tunes). Intelligenty organize your music and write to the external hard drive.
The music stays organized in the folders that you carefully put it in. Not re-organized by loader software.
Cons
The player has the heft of a fullsize 3.5" hard drive.
Some thought needs to go into organization of the music files on the player if you intend to access them quickly. I use "\Music\A,B,C,...Z\artist\album". Just dumping 6000 tracks into one folder won't work. -
Ultimately not worth the coin. It really is unmanagebly large and ugly. If you want tracks to have names, it all must be done manually (ie. rename the mp3 itself) but it was nice to have more variance in organization. It uploads incredibly fast...but takes awhile to load up. The radio barely came in. Mine decided to render the headphone jack useless and I couldn't find a way to fix it. After that the light function stopped so I couldn't use it at night and it just withered away from there. I was pissed that it only took a year for this to occur. Now it simply functions as a massive overhaul of a backup disk.
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