Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy this product, wait until next release
Review: This is a very nice looking product, but it comes up short on a number of key areas in MP3 mode. 1. It is not possible to search throughout a song. For example, let's say we are listening to an MP3 track and we want to rewind it a bit. Not possible. It's 2000 for pete's sake. 2. Holding the fast forward button down causes the unit to advance to the next album. 3. No MP3 label information display.Philips can do better. Especially with the sticker price, they should be ashamed. I would have kept it had it allowed me to fast forward and rewind while playing mp3 tracks; the mp3 label info display wasn't all that important to me. I just bought a similar device that allows me to fast forward and rewind. It also displays MP3 artist/track info, the only problem is that it is a major pain to move to different albums. oh well, it too shall be returned...
Rating: 
Summary: Good but pricy and bad DBB (dynamic base boost)
Review: Pricey for the league. Also DBB produces unacceptable amount of hiss. Other than that should read the tags.
Rating:
Summary: No need to wait awhile
Review: I received mine as an early Xmas present and its changed the way I listed to music overnight -- its wonderful. I have 150 plus songs on one CD categorized into 7 folders; classical, country, oldies etc. The "complaints" listed in some of these reviews are, in my opinion, either minor or made by people who don't own this unit. Too heavy?: the expanium is very light..whoever said it was heavy has never actually held one. No Resume?: it does have a very handy resume button. No ID3 tag support? : Although it does not have ID3 tag support I am not going to search through 150 plus songs looking for that one song I want to hear. Unless one has a 15" monitor that lists all your songs.....I just don't see anyone using the ID3 tag feature on a regular basis. Display? : Yes its hard to read in the dark.... just turn the lights on. None of these quibbles bother me at all. This player is GREAT. For me, its a much better deal than paying $300 for a MP3 only player that holds only 64mb (2 hours) worth of music. If you want to enjoy 10 plus hours of music on one disk there is NO need to wait. This player rules.
Rating: 
Summary: The best CD-MP3 player out there for Xmas 2000!
Review: Interesting that I just read about a few of it's shortcomings! I love this baby! I didn't know it ignored long filenames songs! Anyways, if you are CONCIDERING getting this - get it! I DO miss the ID tags , but what the heck, songs are about LISTENING right? :) Very solid unit. Built great. Volume is a bit low with headphones. Played all my CDRs and CDRWs! no skipping, etc...perfect! jim@cheseborough.com
Rating:
Summary: Awesome player
Review: This player is simply the best out there in the market today. It uses CDR's and CDRW's which is better than those expensive memory cards. Only problem about this is that it is not compatible with all kinds of CDR's and CDRW's. In regard to this, can anyone please help me? What brands or makers of CDR's and CDRW's are compatible or readable for this player. ( Sony, Kodak, Verbatim, Imation, Melody, Maxell etc...?) Thanks to all.
Rating:
Summary: 213 tracks... enough said
Review: so, i fit 213 tracks of music on mine the other day. you know, that about makes up for it's short comings. i agree that the ID3 tag display would be great, and the way it operates is not completely logical (in terms of order of tracks, etc)... but, 213 tracks. i have mine hooked up to my home stereo, and although the quality of most mp3s are pretty crappy, it works great.
Rating:
Summary: average device for an above average price
Review: The EXP 103 is cool because it can play MP3 files. It's not so cool because it is expensive ($), has very poor earphones that are too large to fit in my ears, does not take slight shakes very well, takes an awefully long time to recover from shakes, and has a very hard to read LCD screen. I think it should be fairly priced at ($).
Rating:
Summary: This unit rocks
Review: This is a great MP3-CD Player. In term of sound quality, it is good. When I listen to my MP3s, I notice that piano and guitar harmonics sounds are kind of distorted. Even though I can't tell if it is MP3's encoding problem or the unit's decoding problem, I will say it is MP3's encoding problem because of the way encoders work. Just remember one thing: MP3 player consist of at least 2 important pieces: MP3 decoder which transform MP3 bytestream into waveform, and the D/A convertor which transform waveform into analog signal that we can hear. The MP3 decoder is pretty much 'standard', but the D/A convertor is not. That's where you should look at in term of playback quality, and it is also why I won't buy a shady-brand alternative. Unit does not support ID tags, but it is not a problem to me since I just put inside a drawer in my car. One bad thing in my set up is that I can't do song searching etc. while driving, but perhaps a remote like a standard CD-Player one would help... which is lacking here. I think the MP3 organization on CD can be done with this way (and that's what I do) -- write a README.TXT in each dir that tells you what the heck is in the dir. Name your sub-dir and songs like ALBUM000, 01.mp3 etc. and it should be fine.
Rating:
Summary: A Great One
Review: This one is a great MP3 player: you just burn a CD with MP3 music, then you put it on your Expanium, hit play and its done. You can record tons of music (like 150 songs) in a cd, you can also put them in separated folders and it'll work too. You'll just need one or two cds to store all your music. The only bad thing is that the song name, author, etc. can't be displayed on the lcd screen, but its great.
Rating:
Summary: Tricks for MP3 file names
Review: I enjoy the Expanium, but was a bit disappointed because some of my MP3 CDs contain more than 100 titles and the Expanium only reads 20 or so. It took me some time to discover why, so I share these tricks which I never found anywhere: - only the first 30 characters are read and must contain ".mp3". This means that longer names are ignored. Directories with only long names do not appear in the album count. - as far as I have seen, you can use any character in the names, but only one dot, the one preceding mp3. Songs with more than one dot in the name are ignored. - songs are played in alphabetical order, without making a difference between uppercase and lowercase. Put the track number first if you wish to follow the original disc order. - directories are read first, then level 1 sub-directories, then level 2, ... So, if you have 5 directories and 2 sub-directories in the first directory, these will appear as albums 6 and 7: not very practical! Songs outside directories are counted as an album: a CD without directory has AL00 only; a CD with songs outside any directory, plus 5 directories will have AL01 to AL06. Follow these rules when burning your CDs, and you will not lose any song!
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