TrackZ! Player
The TrackZ! MP3 player is a little larger than a CD-ROM Drive, in a black plastic case with an LCD screen in the front and a control panel on the top. It is basically designed as a car-based unit. Most of the contents of the unit is the 10GB 3.5in hard disk that holds all the MP3s. You can, in fact, put any hard disk you like in the unit, so it is theoretically possible to have 80GB of space. The only thing is that the manufacturer suggests you use 5400RPM drives to keep the heat to a reasonable level. The unit itself has no fan, just a small strip of aluminium inside to help dissipate the heat.
The display is a simple LCD with two rows of 16 characters. When a track starts to play the display zips through the artist, song name, and album title almost too fast to see, then settles on the track name, time remaining, and bitrate.
The control panel takes a bit of getting used to, but with a little fiddling we were able to get it to do what we wanted even without the manual. The manual itself is clear and helpful. The only controls are on the top front of the unit and are labelled "|<", "||>", "|>", "<<", ">>" and "!". This is fairly unhelpful, but they stand for: back one track, play current track, forward one track, back one folder (album), forward one folder and "special" menu.
The TrackZ! has support for Windows only and uses a parallel cable for transfer of tracks to the unit. It is also worth noting that transfers are one way only. Once you have downloaded a track to the TrackZ! you cannot upload it back to your PC (though you can delete it, of course). The parallel transfer is very slow, and the 28MB test files took more than eight minutes to transfer. If you were to attempt to transfer 10GB worth of files, to fill the unit up, it would take more than two days to copy the files across.
The unit is powered by either an AC adaptor or a DC cigarette adaptor, both of which are supplied. There is a single headphone adaptor on the rear which will plug into a line-out to RCA cable or a tape adaptor (both supplied) so that you can hook it up to your car stereo.
The TrackZ! may well suit the car audio market--storage is certainly excellent and upgradeable--but ease of use and the transfer times kept the scores well down.
TrackZ! Player
Company:TrackZ!
Ph:Ph:02 4297 7700
Price:AU$795 (10GB), AU$835 (20GB)
Speed Rating:
Earphone Quality: N/A
Features:
Ease of Use:
Overall Score:
10%
8%
