GO VIDEO AMP256 Sport Rave-MP MP3/WMA Player, 256 MB

Rating:
Summary: Perfect Player For Active Listener
Review: Although I am new to the digital music world, this MP3 Player gives me exactly what I am looking for. I was not looking for a Player where I could store all 100+ hours of my music. I just needed a Player that would give me the background music I needed while exercising or commuting to work. This Player fits those needs perfectly.

It has great sound, perfect size, fits well on the belt or armstrap, easy to use, and has a good price (I am not worried that if I break it that it'll break the bank to replace it). The FM radio is a plus, but it's not a feature I intend to overuse.

The i-pod is trendy, and someday I may purchase one; however, right now this Player is exactly what I need for my active lifestyle. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Okay if you accept its faults....
Review: I bought this at a local retailer because it was on sale and I wanted something I could use while I was running.

First impression wasn't all that great...the power on/off seems to be a bit fudgy, and the stop/down button wouldn't work.

I was on the verge of returning it when I started to pay attention to what I was doing. If the player is playing a song, and you power off, then you have to take the battery it out and reset it to get the thing to come on. The stop/down button was working, just have to hold it longer than all the other button, sure its a problem with the button/hardware.

So keeping those things in mind, if I don't turn it off without stoping a playing song, and ignore the stop button annoyance I figured I could live with the device.

As is I'm not looking to press a tiny button while I'm on a run, so for my purposes it serves well.

The FM Tuner was better than a Sony FM/AM radio thing I used before this on my run, and that was a great surprise and the reason for 4 stars instead of 3.

Rating:
Summary: Needs a firmware upgrade to satisfy me
Review: I got a Rave-MP Sport for my birthday over a month ago. At first I was really excited to have this portable player, but my joy was soon replaced with frustration and irritation. Here's the good, bad and the ugly:

GOOD:
Sounds fine to me as long as the MP3 files are encoded at 128 bit or higher. Having a radio tuner included is nice, but I haven't really used it much so far. I guess it would be handy for checking the news or listening to sports, but I mostly listen to mine in the car or when I'm working out... and I have radios in both of those places.

The size is a plus, since it can very easily fit in a pants or shirt pocket. Since you can lock the buttons, you won't have to worry about inadvertent bumps interrupting your music.

BAD:
Even with the 256MB model, it only held around 70-75 songs. I suppose you could fit more if you encoded the songs at lower quality, but that's not acceptable to me. Even with this low number of songs, it takes about 30 seconds for the player to power-up each time. You'd think it was smart enough to index the files after you upload new tracks, then it would not need to do this every time you turn it on. That's not the case here, and every time you use it you'll have to wait for it to read every file in memory before you can play anything. Because 75 songs was a pretty limited selection, I decided to buy a 512MB SD card. Now I have almost 200 songs on the device, but the boot-up time is almost unbearable. In most cases, it takes about a minute before I can push play to start listening to music.

Another annoying problem is that transferred songs don't always carry all of their ID3 TAG information to the Rave-MP. I had meticulously gone through all of my music and attached Genres to all of my songs. I had assigned every song in my library to Drive, Workout, or Mellow. After I transferred my selected songs to the player, MANY of them were not included in their proper genre, but instead a dozen ended-up as "(12)", where there were 12 songs grouped as a genre of their own for no apparent reason. Songs in this group varied across all artists and assigned genres... so I have no idea what caused the player to do this.

THE UGLY:
As frustrating as the slow startup and genre issues are, nothing frustrates me more than when the device just quits responding. Even though it is playing a song and seems to be running smoothly, sometimes I want to skip to the next track, use the menu, or power-down the device... and it won't respond to any of the buttons. The only option is to take off the cover and remove/replace the battery. To get back to where you were, now you have to wait a minute or so for it to boot again. Grrrrr.....

SUMMARY:
This is the only portable MP3 player I've ever used aside from a few minutes with my nephew's iPOD. His booted in just a couple of seconds every time. I now his cost three times as much, but it also has THIRTY times the storage. The bugs in the firmware of this device are unacceptable, and there needs to be an upgrade issued ASAP. As of today there is still no mention of any of the issues I've mentioned above in the support area of the company's web site. If they eventually release an upgrade that fixes these issues, then this product is a great purchase. If they don't, then I would strongly recommmend buying something else.


Rating:
Summary: The worst piece of electronic equip. I've ever bought.
Review: I got one of these for christmas and it was pretty cool at first and it was working just fine. But then about 2 days later the stop/down arrow button stopped working. So we took it back and exchanged it. When we took it back the lady said they had been having a lot of problems w/ them. Then when i got home i put all my favorite songs on it and sat down to listen to it. But the sound quality was horrible. I don't think i can even describe how bad it was. So we took them back and bought Creative Nomad ones and they work awesome and they have all the same features.

Rating:
Summary: Would be great if I didn't get a defect
Review: I got one of these last month and had to return it after using it for a couple of hours. The headphone jack had a bad connection so you have to twist the connector around to get sound. The player refused to power up after the first shutdown and this problem comes back intermittenly. Taking out the battery and putting it back in seems to correct the problem. At one point, the screen display went blank after pushing the power button but hears music playing after pressing the play button. I am going with the Rio Forge.

Rating:
Summary: Great Player for a week!
Review: I had this Rave-MP AMP 256 player for a week, when it started to hang on the start-up screen. Tech support told me to remove the battery for at least 2 min. This worked a couple of times, then it was format the media by using format. That worked once.
My advice is to pay the extra $20 and go get an iPOD shuffle or something else, as this device is bound to just give you troubles.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good mp3
Review: I owned a Rio s30 for a couple of years till i finally wore it out. I used it for mountain bike most of the time. It was a tough little unit but i did abuse it. Just becuase it has a rubber coating does not make it waterproof. It still works but is handicapped now. My biggest drawback to my Rio and a complaint from many other who own rio mp3 players is the FM tuner. it was horrible to the point of worthless.

After going stir crazy researching Mp3 players i stumbled upon the Rave mp. I also got it a big box retailer for a good price. the first thing i notice was it small size. it was smaller than the Rio. It also came with two USB wires and two sets of headphone one set was a spring loaded retractable wire and the other set standard. The arm band is fine, much like the rio but the Rio clip was better. But the armband is fine and wears well and the Rave is pretty secure. Getting my two computers to find the Rave was simple. I did not download the supplied music manager. I am just using windows media player 10, I have enough programs trying to catalog my music.

Anyhow here our my observations. First all i like the Rave MP. The FM tuner works as well and it plays my music fine. It is easy to navigate the menu and to find the buttons. I found that when i wear the Rave upside down on my arm the buttons are more accesible.
Now i am using a expansion card and do not know if that is what is doing it but when i turn the Rave on it takes a while for it to boot up. What i mean by slow is about 30-45 seconds. The rio was about 10-15 seconds.
It has frozen on me a couple of times. But correcting this is easy, I just remove the battery and reinsert it. Freezing up seems to only happen after disconnecting it from the computer. I also noticed that sometimes when i plug the Rave into my computer it does not read it. I do not know whether it is my computer or the player. the display is fine, it is lighted so you can see it at night but its black backround is a little difficult to see

The Rave is essentially a SD card reader and lists the card as a seperate drive but when u listen music it plays both, for example when u use the random music option it alternates from the card reader to the internal memory as if it was one memory drive. I use my 256 sd card only for music. Syncing music into the Rave took a little practice but I did not use Windows media player in that manner before. The SD card is in the battery compartment and not exposed to the elements. When i excercise i sometimes go for more than three hours. if u do also would highly recommend a Mp3 player with and expansion slot. Main reason, SD Cards have come down in price and Mp3 players with large memory are expensive. The Mp3 players with no expansion slot are smaller and comes with a neck strap, but let me tell u, the rave may be too big to be put around the neck but it is still very small.

All and all i like the Rave Mp3. I recommend it. Now the biggest problems are the slow boot up and sometimes freezing on me this is the only reason i am not giving it five stars. but for looks, sound quality and ease of use and price it is a good little player.

Rating:
Summary: no moving parts is the best part
Review: I spent some time looking at MP3 players. Those with large capacity drives were interesting but somewhat pricy for someone just getting into MP3. I read enough reviews to realize that I needed substantial capacity but didn't want to spend much over $125 for the basic deal. I ran across the Rave -Mp 256 player. It was the right size, it was the right price and with a 512 sd card, it was almost that magic 1 gig in size and it looked pretty cool in red and the company was american and has been around for a few years. The best part though is that it doesn't have any mini-disk to break. The flash technology has been around for sometime and the same cards can be used in cameras, digital video cams and palms as well a mp3 players. Flexibility is a key component.

The unit is easy to use. It powers up in a few seconds. The display is big enough and is back lit when starting and when making changes. If you have XP you don't even need the cd that comes with it (except for the manual that also comes with it in print version). You plug it into what ever USB port your have (1.1 or 2) and you can then down load songs into it. It plays back with very good sound and the controls are easy to use. Battery life appears to be as advertised -- in excess of 14 hours and it uses easy to find and cheap AAA batteries. I would expect a week's vacation to need maybe 3 batteries. Ok 5 is you use it for 5 hours a day.

Headphones that come with it have earhooks and work ok. I'm sure someone makes better ones. They are comfortable for 2 or 3 hours at a time.

Unit comes with some preloaded songs. Obviously included for a young listener and they take up about 64 k of memory. To free memory, you simply go to my computer, open up the drive letter assigned for the unit and delete anything you don't want. This works for songs you add yourself. The memory card will have a different drive letter assigned to it as well.If your computer doesn't automatically recognize the unit and assign it and the card dive letter, just leave it plugged in to the usb cable and re-boot and it should find it just fine.

I would give this MP3player a 5 if it accepted 1 gig flash cards. as it is, it will only take 512 meg cards. So far, I have have 5 compete 20+ song albums on mine and I have used about 40% of the 256 +512 memory. I just ordered another 512 card so I will have plenty of storage. All told, the price is under $200 for 1.2 gig of memory and nothing to break.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Stereo Headphone Jack connection
Review: In order to receive proper connection you cannot allow the headphone jack to be fully depressed into the mini-plug. Therefore the headset connection is not secure.

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME MP3 PLAYER
Review: this mp3 player is da bomb yo dawg. i got this PIIIMP player for x-as from the big man. i can't put this ghetto blaster down yo. i love it. it aint as good as ipod but for the price and the storage itz gr8. u can buy a card that goez in da bak of it and givez it more storage for lyke 14 hours of music yo. i luvz this player and you better buy it dawg cuz it iz PIMP