Rating: 
Summary: Nice player/kit, just one wish item
Review: Santa left one of these players under the tree for me this year, and so far it has behaved very well. Overall I am pretty pleased with it, especially given that it came with kit components.I'm slightly disappointed by the fact that the player always plays MP3 tracks in alphabetical order for a given folder (not counting when it's set to random), so when I listen to a folder with tracks from a symphony or soundtrack, they don't play in the order they were ripped. Of course I could append a track number to the name of the file before burning MP3 CDs, but I'd prefer to be able to set the player to process by file creation date (i.e., track order as ripped) or alphabetically. I've sent e-mail to Memorex's customer support with this question, so we'll see what they say.
Rating: 
Summary: No luck with MP3s, taking it back...
Review: I read the rest of the reviews on this board, and people either loved it or hated it, so I took a chance. As everyone else said, the instruction manual is worthless. I have a re-writable cd drive, copied some mp3s to a Memorex CD-RW Platinum disk, and after trying for a few hours with no success getting even one mp3 song to play, packaged it back up and will be returning it shortly. I'm really excited about this technology and will get one when Sony comes out with it, as I have never had a problem with their instructions or equipment, thumbs down to Memorex.
Rating:
Summary: Great for the price, much better than earlier makes/models
Review: I've read some of the Memorex 8505 reviews and conclude that the ones having trouble have either the initial release of the player (no Suffix A to indicate the firmware revision), somewhat quirky CD burning or both. It's probably mostly the Memorex player fault. Our Suffix A revision has been used all week, with mostly 160 Kbps MP3s and has worked fine. The controls aren't hard. It's more like a 'button, button who's got the button' kind of annoyance. After all, they are mostly for search, which most of the alternative players can't even do. Anyway, get the latest revision and you should be happy like we are.
Rating:
Summary: A really good player
Review: The Memorex mp3 player works... but its pretty tricky to get it to work. I had some trouble getting it to play my mp3 songs on my first try. I had to create a subfolder on my cd and then keep trying to get the faults out. It was very picky. Finally, I got it to work and it works almost flawlessly. It has very good sound and bass boost, which I enjoyed. The car kit works as well. I came across a few problems, such as some rare skips during playback. Sometimes the player shut off altogether, forcing me to reload the cd's information at the beginning for about 10 sec. (It has to do this every time you start to listen.) I believe that this has to do with that the player was using its power plug, not playing on batteries. I am happy with the player though, and it far outbeats those 64 MG mp3 players which can only play a few songs, unlike this one which can play a huge amount, like 150 songs. I also like the ID3 tags (they show the name of the artist, song, and album.) Unfortunately, my screen blanks out once in a while and freezes, although playback continues. I still believe that this player was a great value since it was cheap compared to other players, and still played well, which was all that I really wanted.
Rating: 
Summary: it's the future
Review: mp3 is defenitely where the music future is heading, this player is great, doesnt cost much and gives just as much quality as the other expensive ones. The buttons are a bit annoying and hard to press and at first its hard to find which button does what. all the accesories are great the sound quality is amazing and the ear-phones are good. the player is pretty and I've walked around with it and haven't had it skip yet. In two words:good buy. go get it
Rating:
Summary: Best MP3/CD player of the currently available lot
Review: My criteria for a decent mp3/cd player is something that supports ID3 tags (shows title/artist/album info if it was encoded in the mp3), a good button interface that is usable when you can't really look and read each button, something that doesn't skip like mad. This player fulfills all of those and here were the drawbacks I've seen: no backlight for its display (something that I'm positive Memorex will fix in the next model), the search function hasn't worked for me at all yet though other people report it, it does skip occasionally but it's not enough to bother me plus I think some of it is a problem with mp3 itself as one of the worse skips happened twice, both on the same song in I think the same place! Also, the player doesn't resume when its been powered off and it'll power off on its own in what seems to be less than 5 minutes which is a bit of a pain to me because I'll stop it so I can talk to someone but I want to be able to hit the resume button within say 15 min and have it resume immediately. But in the end, it's better that it powers off on its own because your batteries won't get worn down as much via accidental power ups if something hits the play button. My wish: a longer "idle" period. Bottom line, I think when you read the other people's reviews it becomes clear that a lot depends on how well you burn the cds in the first place. And when you compare this to the Phillips boxy player & the other few players out there, it's really very much better because most of the others don't have ID3 support and many have very difficult to use button interfaces (too close together). And considering that this is available at about half the price of the Phillips machine which fails on both ID3 & usable interface.... it's the best machine if you want something NOW Sure this isn't the best possible player but the problem is that that player hasn't been BUILT yet. I really do think that for all the pros that this player has in comparison to the other players, it's worth dealing with a few cons, some of which you can overcome yourself. So personally.. I still need to experiment with burning cds because I did it using what other people said not to which is probably why the search function isn't working for me. I want to offer this experience ... on the same CD which contains 189 tracks, I'd get varied "read track" reports. If I let it just load and count them without interference... I'd get a count of 187 and it would start playing on the 34th song. If I immediately set the "play mode" to Random when I powered on, it'd start playing within a few seconds and the track count would vary greatly. So obviously, the player isn't reading two of the songs and if you don't let it just do its thing when you turn it on, it won't read the CD fully.
Rating:
Summary: Initial impressions
Review: The mere thought of an mp3/cd player gives me wood :P So it was with much excitement that I finally bought one. My initial reaction is "hell yeah." Decent headphones, a complete car kit (so you don't have to drain the batteries while jamming to your tunes in your car), and lots and lots of neat options. Searching and id3 tag reading and 45 second skip protection, oh my! :) Not to mention file folders. The only downside is the confusing interface. Getting the thing to turn on is a bit of a trial. You have to keep hitting the play button in various combinations before the player clicks on. This will prove fun in the morning bus ride, as the display doesn't glow. Oh well. At least now I can fit my entire cd collection (about 1300 songs) onto 7 or 8 cds. Nice :) Oh yeah; the file search is a bit weird too. Haven't quite figured it out, but it shouldn't be that hard. It's probably due to my mp3's not having any id3 tags :) One caveat, however: If the model number/type/whatever DOES NOT have "suffix A" added on, RETURN IT. It's a piece of crap. Suffix A works just fine though. Rock on, buy this product, and be the first person on your block to have the next wave of technology in your hands :D
Rating:
Summary: Impressive, especially for the price
Review: My brother bought this for me for Christmas and I've been playing it the last two days at work without a hitch. I borrowed some random mp3 discs that he'd burned and it's played every mp3 so far(150-200 per disc). It has not skipped once, though I've only been using it at my desk so far. After reading the reviews I tried tapping, bumping, shaking it, and no problems with skipping, definitely better than any portable CD player I've ever owned. I've been listening to it on random and it has not repeated a song yet(some have subdirectories, some don't). The only drawbacks are the navigatability(Not sure how to switch between directories, but haven't consulted the manual either) or figured out the search feature(haven't tried). Hadn't thought about no backlight, but that would have been a nice option for night use. I like that it comes with all the key accessories: Headphones, AC Adaptor, Cigarette Adapter, Cassette Adaptor. FYI, no batteries and no case. I've only been using it for 2 days, but love it so far. I am really looking forward to burning some mp3 disc. I am going to love being able to put whole collections one one or two discs...talk about revolutionizing the portable music market. I didn't know the price til I came here, but that too is amazing...I think back to paying close to $200 for my first Sony Discman...haha. The negatives are very minor for a first run product. If you're interested, I say get it now. When they come out with an even better product you can always upgrade. Meanwhile I plan on getting a whole lot of use out of my new toy!
Rating:
Summary: Memory limits track storage to 24, otherwise excellent MP3
Review: I've used the MPD8505CPA for a few days & like it overall. It has excellent sound & anti-shock has never skipped in the car even on dirt roads. Most of my MP3 CDs play fine, except those recorded with Variable Bit Rate (VBR, supported by RealJukeBox 2 Plus among others) when the rate goes above 128 kbps (the max this player supports); then you just get silence. Music track info (Album & Song Title) is shown in a window that auto-scrolls horizontally if a bit slowly. FIND searches for strings & works fine. The main limit is that you can resequence only 24 tracks of say 160 on a CD, then the player reverts to the track order on the disk, making its track storage feature useless.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Idea, But The Technology Isn't Ready
Review: I was really enthusiastic about this product and put it in my wish list for Christmas. When I received it, I put in an ISO9660 CD with MP3 files. It read the CD and recognized file names, but it kept pausing during playback. Sometimes it simply stopped and gave an error. The manual suggested that the problem was most likely with my CD. Perhaps it was, but I've tried the same tracks in a computer and they played perfectly well. I didn't use any shareware or unnusual formatting making the discs -- they were single session ISO9660 discs written by Adaptec Toast on, ironically, a Memorex Disc with SoundJam encoded MP3s. Still, maybe there were small errors. And maybe, if the CD were 100% pristine, it would play just fine. But this is the real world and Memorex should take that into account and put some better error handling capabilities into the hardware. I'm sure in another year or so, these products will provide far better error-free playback. So unless you want to jump through hoops burning CDs just-so to keep this player happy, I would hold-off. I returned mine.
| 
