MyMusix SD mp3 player is a nice gadget

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Product: MyMusix PD-205 MP3 player
Company: MyMusix
Price: varies, $20 - $75 (with and without SD card)
Web Site: www.mymusix.com

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I WANTED something to replace my ageing Kodak MC3 player, and looked for one small, portable player that could use the SD memory cards I already have for my digital camera. I found the MyMusix PD-20x series players online at Amazon.com and it seemed to be the answer to my dreams, so I ordered one.

The idea behind the MyMusix "flash less" player is simple: an affordable, lightweight and minimal MP3 player with great battery life on a single "AAA" battery, and a small but informative LCD screen with backlight showing song names via the embedded ID3 tags into MP3 files, showing playing time, repeat and battery info, and with easy menus for configuration of all parameters, including pre set equalizer modes.

The PD-205 MyMusix MP3 player, with included earbuds

There is one small problem, however: the unit I received didn't work. It took me a lot of time and effort to find out that some silly design pitfalls can lead some people to conclude they have a broken player when in fact they have a "healthy", working unit that only needs the magic touch of a screwdriver to come back to life. Here's my experience with the MyMusix PD-205.

Introduction

The MyMusix player can be found for sale both with and without a bundled SD card - in that case you have to supply your own. The 205 model with 1GB Sandisk SD card is currently going for $75 at RadioShack stores throughout the U.S. But in my case I got the 205 without any SD card for around $20. You too can find it from $19.90 to $40 depending on seller at Amazon.com.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, you can see below that the unit features two buttons, one labelled "menu" -which also serves as power on/off, and a 5-way "pointer" button that can be moved up/down, left/right, and pressed. This button is used to move around the menu structure when not in playback mode, and to move to the previous/next song while in playback mode, while the up and down movements are used to turn the volume up and down. The MyMusix PD-205 features no internal memory, and supports SD memory sizes up to 1GB, with the PD-205-02 supporting SD cards up to 2GB inserted on its side socket. A pair of average quality "earbuds" are included, along with a strong lanyard cord, perfect for hanging the MyMusix player from your neck while exercising. You can see a 800k GIF animation of the available menu options at my site here.

Top: inverted LCD screen with backlight off. Barely readable but saves battery.
Bottom: Mini USB, SD sockets, battery.

The "Mini USB" connector on the side and included USB cable allows the MyMusix to be mapped as a removable flash drive to your Windows -and Linux- systems, without the need of removing the SD card from its place. And removing the SD card needlessly is something I encourage you not to do, see below.

The Good

Leaving aside the few hardware and firmware annoyance issues you might encounter -and which can be easily fixed if you follow the suggestions below-, the MyMusix PD-205 is a great player. It will be my favourite mp3 player for my morning hour long walks, and a great replacement for the bulky Kodak MC3 I've been using for years. Battery life is excellent, I got two and a half hours of playback out of a cheap NiMH rechargeable AAA on the first day of use, with a battery that wasn't fully charged to begin with. Contrast this with the MC3 which eats 3 fully charged AAA batteries in about one hour and a half. The included earbuds do a decent job, yet I prefer something better like the pair of Panasonic 'spiral clip-on headphones' which I've been using with my Kodak MC3 for years.

Another good part is that tech support is surprisingly helpful and responsive. They even e-mailed me a "recovery utility" and associated windows driver which is used to "force feed" the original 1.0.7 firmware version to a unit, even if it's apparently "dead".

Player recognized as removable flash drive on Linux

As a last note, I plugged the MyMusix player in linux (BLAG distro, based on Fedora Core 3) and the unit was automagically recognized as a "mp3 player" removable flash media unit, with full file management from the Gnome desktop.

The Bad Before I start let me clarify that this was my personal experience with the unit I bought as "open box". Chances are you might never encounter the same exact problem I had. I'm just giving my experience in case some of you do encounter some of these problems.

Trouble-spots in my PD-205. All but the USB issue
were solved with the touch of a screwdriver

When I received the unit, it didn't power on. I exchanged batteries, and still got the same result. However, when I plugged the unit to the PC via the USB cable, the LCD screen lighted up and the unit came to life. I was puzzled. To make a long story short... there's a very thin metal wire piece making contact with the battery's positive (+) tip. The problem is that this metal wire, unless forced with a screwdriver to give more pressure against the battery, can sometimes not touch the battery. That was the (first) problem with my unit, as simple as that, and very easy to fix, but a real hair pulling exercise if you don't realize what is wrong.

Second, the mini USB connector on the side... it's possible to plug the tiny connector into the unit upside-down!. This is very nasty and the unit will start flashing the screen if you do -not to mention it'll never show as connected to the PC side-. Pay careful attention when plugging the usb cable so that a small triangle-shaped symbol on the miniUSB male plug faces you when looking at the unit with the battery compartment facing up. Third problem: -and third time's a charm-, when I inserted my SD card -in fact, it didn't matter which card- I got a nasty message "no file!" on the player. To make another long story short, it turned out that the player, as shipped, didn't support MP3 files on a folder, it expects all mp3 files to be on the root directory. This can be fixed with firmware updates available on the company's web site. You must first apply 1.00.18 and then -and only then- you can update to 1.00.20, which is the latest release available on the site.

And finally, at least on my player which was an "open box" item, one of the contacts on the SD socket didn't apply enough pressure to the SD card so apparently the unit sometimes didn't get access to the SD card due to a bad contact. Since I'm a hardware hacker at heart and never afraid to tear apart electronic gadgets, I solved it by removing two screws from the battery compartment, carefully opening the unit, removing two screws more and removing the circuit board, to finally expose the SD socket. There, with a soft pressure on each tin piece touching the SD card contacts -with the card in place- I fixed the random "no file" problem.

In short: all four issues described could be easily fixed by the manufacturer by doing a hardware revision to the player, and perhaps by using a higher quality manufacturing process. But hey, you get what you pay for, so for my $20, I couldn't complain. It was a nice experience to see the guts of a low-end, affordable mp3 player, which after my fiddling now -knock on wood- works beautifully.

The Ugly

There's nothing really "ugly" about this unit. In fact, once you update your unit to the latest firmware, and if you follow my advice not to remove and insert SD cards all the time, trying to leave a SD card in there and using the USB cable for file management, the unit can be a reliable workhorse, that is, if an MP3 player can be considered a work horse.

I can only think of one nasty feature of the latest firmware (1.0.20) and earlier versions available on the MyMusix site: when you remove your battery -or when it runs dry- you lose all your configuration settings (equalizer, loop, screen backlight time-outs, etc). Hopefully, there's a fix for this, in the form of a 1.00.25 firmware that surprisingly, doesn't seem to be official -or at least, doesn't show up on the MyMusix site. This firmware update -which I found by googling around- adds the ability to create a "settings file" on the PC (settings.dat) by using an included Windows utility. By placing this settings.dat file at the root dir of the SD card, your player -provided it has been upgraded to 1.00.25 firmware- will load the settings whenever it's powered on, so you will no longer lose your carefully set preferences. This windows utility allows setting everything, from the power off idle time to the screen backlight settings, Equalizer default setting, even the default volume for the unit!.

The Verdict

Perhaps some of my bad experiences with the hardware were due to the use -or abuse- of the owner who returned the "open box" item to the seller before me, so I won't hold MyMusix accountable for problems which could have been user generated. However, some "trouble spots" like for instance the possibility of inserting the mini USB plug upside down, or the otherwise nice v1.00.25 firmware and its associated settings utility not being available from the company's web page certainly can be blamed on them.

After updating, a work of art: MyMusix PD-205 runnign the "unofficial" 1.00.25 firmware
with Panasonic clip headphones. Top: Windows 'config utility'

However, once and if you get a unit whose SD socket contacts are good and clean, and provided you don't abuse the SD card insertion and extraction and if you use the USB cable for data management, this player can be a great buy, specially if you have one or more SD cards lying around and if you can get this player without the bundled SD card for $20 or $30. If you purchase the SD-card bundled version from a Radio Shack store, there's one more bonus, you can easily exchange it back in case you experience any problem.

If these small companies invested a bit more in marketing and beefed up their quality control, I wonder who would still buy an IPod. For me, my working MyMusix PD-205 is more than adequate for my needs. I give this three and a half Fernandos in my one-to-five personal rating scale - or seven over ten, if you prefer. ?