DMC Xclef 500 80 gig Review
3/01/05
I wouldn't usually see the need to write a consumer review of any sort, but this is a bit of an exception. Before I bought this mp3 player I managed to find only one actual review, and it didn't leave much of an impression. So I figured what the hell - I'll throw my hat in the ring. Anyway, I picked the 80 gig Xclef out to replace my old 20 gig Nomad Zen, which died on me a while ago after about a year and a half of use. I considered getting another Creative product, but I'd read too much about them being plagued by quality problems (I blame mine breaking down on abuse). I looked at all the hard drive players out there and this one was the best value, not to mention the most storage, period. (it also comes in a 100 gig version). While I was harboring a perverse desire to break down and get an iPod, I decided on the Xclef.
The first thing you notice about the player is that's its rather large. Compared to the Nomad and other players of similar size, it's not too bad, but if you stick it next to an iPod it's a monster. All in all it's not a big deal; just don't plan on walking around with it your jeans pocket. (I've tried, it's not very comfortable). I do just fine with it in my jacket or backpack. Loading songs onto it is pretty straightforward; it just acts as a hard drive, something that was sorely lacking in the Nomad. The USB 2.0 transfer is reasonably fast; I transferred 60+ gigs overnight easily.
Navigating through the songs once on the player is a different story, however. The interface is not particularly intuitive. Nowhere in the manual did it explain that you needed to use the stop button as a back button for navigating through folders. It took me forever to notice this, and was ready to throw it out the window by the time I figured it out. It's also a pain to scroll though hundreds of artist names (if you've bought this player, you have that much music). The search feature is meant to alleviate this a bit, but it's also somewhat poorly designed. You can only search for individual songs, not by artist or album. You can kind of cheat a little bit by searching for a song, playing it, and then stopping it. This will leave you at that album's directory and you can go from there, but it's still a pain. It also gives you a tree view, which is nice, but I never use it.
One thing I immediately noticed missing coming from using the Nomad was the fact that there is no queue. You basically navigate to what you want and hit play. If it finishes with the directory it's in, it simply goes to the next one. This isn't inherently a problem, I actually like being able to keep listening to the same artist after an album's done. The only problem is you can't queue up different tracks or multiple albums while you're listening to something. You can sort of get around this with playlists, but this has its own problems.
At first glance, I was enthralled by the way they have playlists set up. Basically, it uses .m3u playlists, as in the ones generated by Winamp. I was very pleased with this see as how I have numerous mixes (primarily for snowboarding) and they're all in said format. On the Nomad I actually ended up writing a script to copy files in a playlist because their method of making playlists was so kludgy. Although I had to do some path juggling to get my playlists to work, it was a fairly easy process once I had it figured out. Unfortunately, there's a bug that songs won't show up in playlists if the file name is over a certain length. It also has a similar problem with song order within a directory, which means if songs are over a certain length they pretty much play at random, even they are named by track and have correct id3 tags. I called tech support on these issues and I was basically told that they knew about it and there wasn't a user workaround. I honestly don't remember if they said there was a firmware fix coming (this was a month or two ago), but I don't remember feeling particularly hopeful after the phone call.
I suppose this wouldn't be a big deal for some people, but as someone who's A: anal with their music and B: a programmer who knows bugs like this are simply sloppy coding because of bad assumptions. I would also probably be more forgiving if they were isolated bugs. The software unfortunately seems buggy all around. Occasionally when navigating around the menus will get stuck in a directory loop or simply hang, requiring a reset. It will also randomly shut down if jarred in a certain way. If you're just listening at a desk this isn't a big deal, but if you take it in a backpack or in the car (you know, the idea behind a portable player), this is a serious pain. What worries me about this is that I've only noticed the shutdown problem recently, so I fear the player may be going on the fritz (hopefully it's just because I've been using it more lately).
Just a few other things: The power save feature does not kick in if you've left it on pause and will sit draining the battery all the way down. There is a random play mode which is nice because it lets you do random over the whole player, which can be highly entertaining to hear songs you forgot you had. Of course, the downside is that you can only do random of the whole player, you can't do a single album, artist, or playlist. The playlist part rather pissed me off, but you can kind of get around that if you use Cyclef Explorer. The program will let you randomize a playlist, which helps a little. That software has its own issues, the least of which being its lack of being free, but I won't get into that here. Lastly, the player takes a while to boot up. It takes 20-30 seconds normally and if you've just disconnected it from the computer, it takes even longer, often as much as a minute or two. I think it rebuilds its internal library every time, so it varies with how much you have on the player.
Ok, I may be sounding really down on the player here, and I'll be honest, there was definitely some disappointments there. Still, there are definitely some good things about it. The battery life is extremely good, although not quite up to the promised 22 hours. For sporadic daily use, I can go a week or two without charging it and I've used it on all day drives without running out of juice. It also makes it through a full workday easily with nightly charging. The external controls are well laid out and easy to use by feel. I can find the pause and volume buttons easily while still keeping my eyes on the road. The jog button which lets you scroll up down is a bit annoying because it also skips a song if you hit it during playback. Although the button is aggravatingly easy to hit, the key lock button is really easy to switch on and off quickly, preventing the problem.
By the way, the remote that you can buy for this is pretty good (and cheap too, only $15). I rigged it up so I can snowboard with the player in my Camelbak, with the remote wired out to the front straps. The most important feature of the remote, the pause button, is large enough that I can hit it easily with snowboard gloves on, even my heavily duct-taped ones. The volume and track skip buttons are a little harder to hit, but if you're not trying to do it all bundled up, they're just fine. You can also turn the player on and off from the remote, which was an unexpected bonus.
There are also some other nice features unique to this player that I don't actually use, like an FM tuner and recording function, so I can't really comment on them. They did seem to try to pack a lot of features into here; you can also read text files (although I'm not sure why you'd want to). There's also the fact that they officially support the replacing of the hard drive with a larger one if you so choose (they even sell a version without a drive at all). I mention it because it's so rare to see a company that actually trusts its customers.
So anyway, bottom line: This player definitely could use some improvement on lots of little things, but you simply can't beat the price if you're looking for a lot of storage. The fact that I don't have to nitpick what I want to put on the player is a huge bonus for me. If you're an mp3 novice, or not very familiar with computers in general, you'll probably have problems with this player. Provided you have the proper patience (which I have - sometimes), the buggy software isn't that big of a deal. If the company manages to stay afloat long enough, the next version of this player might be pretty dang cool.
I wouldn't usually see the need to write a consumer review of any sort, but this is a bit of an exception. Before I bought this mp3 player I managed to find only one actual review, and it didn't leave much of an impression. So I figured what the hell - I'll throw my hat in the ring. Anyway, I picked the 80 gig Xclef out to replace my old 20 gig Nomad Zen, which died on me a while ago after about a year and a half of use. I considered getting another Creative product, but I'd read too much about them being plagued by quality problems (I blame mine breaking down on abuse). I looked at all the hard drive players out there and this one was the best value, not to mention the most storage, period. (it also comes in a 100 gig version). While I was harboring a perverse desire to break down and get an iPod, I decided on the Xclef.
The first thing you notice about the player is that's its rather large. Compared to the Nomad and other players of similar size, it's not too bad, but if you stick it next to an iPod it's a monster. All in all it's not a big deal; just don't plan on walking around with it your jeans pocket. (I've tried, it's not very comfortable). I do just fine with it in my jacket or backpack. Loading songs onto it is pretty straightforward; it just acts as a hard drive, something that was sorely lacking in the Nomad. The USB 2.0 transfer is reasonably fast; I transferred 60+ gigs overnight easily.
Navigating through the songs once on the player is a different story, however. The interface is not particularly intuitive. Nowhere in the manual did it explain that you needed to use the stop button as a back button for navigating through folders. It took me forever to notice this, and was ready to throw it out the window by the time I figured it out. It's also a pain to scroll though hundreds of artist names (if you've bought this player, you have that much music). The search feature is meant to alleviate this a bit, but it's also somewhat poorly designed. You can only search for individual songs, not by artist or album. You can kind of cheat a little bit by searching for a song, playing it, and then stopping it. This will leave you at that album's directory and you can go from there, but it's still a pain. It also gives you a tree view, which is nice, but I never use it.
One thing I immediately noticed missing coming from using the Nomad was the fact that there is no queue. You basically navigate to what you want and hit play. If it finishes with the directory it's in, it simply goes to the next one. This isn't inherently a problem, I actually like being able to keep listening to the same artist after an album's done. The only problem is you can't queue up different tracks or multiple albums while you're listening to something. You can sort of get around this with playlists, but this has its own problems.
At first glance, I was enthralled by the way they have playlists set up. Basically, it uses .m3u playlists, as in the ones generated by Winamp. I was very pleased with this see as how I have numerous mixes (primarily for snowboarding) and they're all in said format. On the Nomad I actually ended up writing a script to copy files in a playlist because their method of making playlists was so kludgy. Although I had to do some path juggling to get my playlists to work, it was a fairly easy process once I had it figured out. Unfortunately, there's a bug that songs won't show up in playlists if the file name is over a certain length. It also has a similar problem with song order within a directory, which means if songs are over a certain length they pretty much play at random, even they are named by track and have correct id3 tags. I called tech support on these issues and I was basically told that they knew about it and there wasn't a user workaround. I honestly don't remember if they said there was a firmware fix coming (this was a month or two ago), but I don't remember feeling particularly hopeful after the phone call.
I suppose this wouldn't be a big deal for some people, but as someone who's A: anal with their music and B: a programmer who knows bugs like this are simply sloppy coding because of bad assumptions. I would also probably be more forgiving if they were isolated bugs. The software unfortunately seems buggy all around. Occasionally when navigating around the menus will get stuck in a directory loop or simply hang, requiring a reset. It will also randomly shut down if jarred in a certain way. If you're just listening at a desk this isn't a big deal, but if you take it in a backpack or in the car (you know, the idea behind a portable player), this is a serious pain. What worries me about this is that I've only noticed the shutdown problem recently, so I fear the player may be going on the fritz (hopefully it's just because I've been using it more lately).
Just a few other things: The power save feature does not kick in if you've left it on pause and will sit draining the battery all the way down. There is a random play mode which is nice because it lets you do random over the whole player, which can be highly entertaining to hear songs you forgot you had. Of course, the downside is that you can only do random of the whole player, you can't do a single album, artist, or playlist. The playlist part rather pissed me off, but you can kind of get around that if you use Cyclef Explorer. The program will let you randomize a playlist, which helps a little. That software has its own issues, the least of which being its lack of being free, but I won't get into that here. Lastly, the player takes a while to boot up. It takes 20-30 seconds normally and if you've just disconnected it from the computer, it takes even longer, often as much as a minute or two. I think it rebuilds its internal library every time, so it varies with how much you have on the player.
Ok, I may be sounding really down on the player here, and I'll be honest, there was definitely some disappointments there. Still, there are definitely some good things about it. The battery life is extremely good, although not quite up to the promised 22 hours. For sporadic daily use, I can go a week or two without charging it and I've used it on all day drives without running out of juice. It also makes it through a full workday easily with nightly charging. The external controls are well laid out and easy to use by feel. I can find the pause and volume buttons easily while still keeping my eyes on the road. The jog button which lets you scroll up down is a bit annoying because it also skips a song if you hit it during playback. Although the button is aggravatingly easy to hit, the key lock button is really easy to switch on and off quickly, preventing the problem.
By the way, the remote that you can buy for this is pretty good (and cheap too, only $15). I rigged it up so I can snowboard with the player in my Camelbak, with the remote wired out to the front straps. The most important feature of the remote, the pause button, is large enough that I can hit it easily with snowboard gloves on, even my heavily duct-taped ones. The volume and track skip buttons are a little harder to hit, but if you're not trying to do it all bundled up, they're just fine. You can also turn the player on and off from the remote, which was an unexpected bonus.
There are also some other nice features unique to this player that I don't actually use, like an FM tuner and recording function, so I can't really comment on them. They did seem to try to pack a lot of features into here; you can also read text files (although I'm not sure why you'd want to). There's also the fact that they officially support the replacing of the hard drive with a larger one if you so choose (they even sell a version without a drive at all). I mention it because it's so rare to see a company that actually trusts its customers.
So anyway, bottom line: This player definitely could use some improvement on lots of little things, but you simply can't beat the price if you're looking for a lot of storage. The fact that I don't have to nitpick what I want to put on the player is a huge bonus for me. If you're an mp3 novice, or not very familiar with computers in general, you'll probably have problems with this player. Provided you have the proper patience (which I have - sometimes), the buggy software isn't that big of a deal. If the company manages to stay afloat long enough, the next version of this player might be pretty dang cool.
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