Rating: 
Summary: #1 Comes to Amazon
Review: Pine just announced that any day they will be releasing the SM200C "Plus." But for those of us that need our MP3 CD fix now, the non-"Plus"ed SM200C is an acceptable alternative.The SM200C is a great unit, and if you take my word and the word of top MP3 web sites, it's probably the best MP3 CD player anywhere. Whether it's sound quality or the ability to adapt to the many variations of the MP3 standard, Pine really took their time to get the most important aspects of the player right. (REALLY took their time! I first saw the prototype for this player at 1998 Comdex.) The SM200C will play every MP3 that I throw at it, including VBR and CBR down to 8 BPS (The manual says it won't go below 32 BPS). It also handles multisession discs and ID3 tags. Unfortunately, there seem to be some discrepancies in the ID3 standard and the flavor that the SM200C recognizes only displays the song title whenever I put in any of the CDs that I have. The player comes bundled with MusicMatch. I stopped using MusicMatch because its ID3 format was incompatible with the Memorex player that I had before the SM200C. I have recently tried playing a MusicMatch CD in the SM200C and still only got the song title. Don't know what the trick is to seeing the Artist, but I wish I did. When taken with the fact that the songs aren't divided into directories, figuring out who's singing can be a real trick. You may have asked, "so why ditch the Memorex when it has more features?" Simple, what good are features when the Memorex's sound is full of deafening pops and clicks. And that's not the half of it. The Memorex player is just a mess. Not surprisingly, the features that are notably lacking in the SM200C are exactly what they've added to the SM200CPlus. A bigger skip buffer (The SM200C skips VERY easily), the ability to jump between directories (right now it plays all the songs as though they were in one big directory), and a suspend & resume feature. Speaking of suspend & resume, the SM200C has the wonderful ability to switch between its included NiMH batteries and the AC power supply literally without missing a beat. Given how long it takes any MP3 CD player to wind up, this is a huge plus. So in summary, this is definitely the best player you can buy from Amazon now. But if they change over to the SM200CPlus, JUMP! Especially if it's at this same price (MSRP for the Plus is over two hundred dollars). Also, be on the lookout for another new player from Pine called the 300T that will cost less and do more. Trust me, once you finally get an MP3 CD player you'll kick yourself for waiting as long as you did. We'd all love it if some big name like Sony were to put out the definitive player (I'm holding my 5 star rating for when that day comes). But that's not likely to happen anytime soon given MP3's central role in facilitating piracy. So for now, we need to look for the best we can from the Pacific rim's "also-rans." I've read a ton of reviews and I haven't seen anything that touches Pine. Amazon hasn't included very much basic information on the player here, and they don't like people to put URLs in their reviews, so I'll just say that it's Pine-DMusic Company. And let you figure it out from there.... Enjoy, I definitely am.
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