I upgraded my CD player to the MP3 player on Wednesday, and spent some time playing around with it. Here's my (early) review.

Review in short: Eh. But still beats a disc changer.

Review in long:
I listen entirely to MP3s these days. After a double-blind test showed that an audience of twenty average people (including me) was unable to pick out the original track when comparing the original with 128Kbps MP3, I pretty much ditched my CD collection and moved everything over to MP3s. I have an Audiotron integrated with my stereo in my living room; a horrible, now-discontinued combined MP3+Amp in my bedroom; an iPod for use when I travel; and of course iTunes and MusicMatch on my laptop and PC, respectively.

I am consistently amazed at how, in general, people who make MP3 players do not seem to do a good job designing them or implementing features. Car stereo MP3 players seem even worse off than the home audio - impossible to navigate around, poorly made interface choices, and a royal pain in the butt to use while driving. (The one exception to this, of course, is the overly-designed Apple iPod, but which sucks to use in a car.)

The Mazda MP3 player is better than most car MP3 players, but is still pretty lacking in small, annoying ways that could have been fixed with an hour's forethought by the implementation team.

What it does: it plays MP3s that you have stored on a CD, even multi-session CDs. It recognizes the different directories (or folders) on the CD as containing different "albums," and uses the disc select button to move between albums. The albums and songs are played in the order that they were burned to the disc. The display button moves between displaying twelve characters worth of track/time, file name, folder name, album tag, title tag, and artist tag; you can scroll to see up to 30 characters total. It is smart enough to usually remove the standard "CD" prefix on the display, but it re-adds the sequence number (not the track number) to the file name display.

What it does not do: anything quickly - it's very slow. When using the "next disc" key to move between albums (directories), it does not display what the next album would be, just "CD 03," so you kind of have to either remember what the third directory on the CD is or wait for it to (slowly) start playing to recognize it. It does not support play lists, playing random tracks from just one album, repeating just one album, or any kind of music selection other than "disc up/down" and "track next/previous" - which, oddly, is actually all I needed - there's not enough MP3s on one CD to make "browse by artist" useful.

What this means: you can't just grab-and-rip a CD from MusicMatch - your songs will be displayed poorly and play in alphabetical order (!). But if you take time and care with the ordering of the songs and rename the tracks into things that will be useful in a 12-character display, the MP3 player is much, much better than a CD changer and much easier than an iPod with radio tuner. If they had added support for play lists and had displayed the directory name when using "disc up/down," I would have posted an enthusiastic post about how everyone should upgrade. But they didn't, and the usability of the product suffers as a result, and I only give it a lukewarm reception. It's hard to see spending $500 on a product with a fraction of the functionality of a $300 iPod.

All of this is a pale shadow of functionality of what happens in the future when you can trick the stereo head unit into thinking that an iPod is really a MD player, trick your iPod into thinking that the steering wheel controls are really the remote, and trick both into putting the display on the dashboard - then we'd have some pretty cool stuff. Until then, the MP3 player will have to do. [ BTW, anyone who wants to donate a complete head unit and MD player (I happen to have a spare CD player) to some engineers in Iowa City to try and implement such a beast, please let me know... 8^) ]

Sidebar 1: Carousel Motors in Iowa City saved my RX-8 sale after Mazda corporate treated me so poorly during my pre-order period. Carousel rocks. Just wanted to let y'all know.

Sidebar 2: Am I the only one who likes to listen to CDs in shuffle mode? Pressing “RDM” on either the MP3 player or CD player will stop the current song (!) to move into shuffle mode. I guess that's not so bad... except that pressing "next track" while in shuffle mode will turn off shuffle mode! There's no way to skip a song in shuffle mode! Given the odd mix of really cool stuff combined with really strange gaffes all throughout the audio system, I think that someone took their eye off the ball somewhere with this one and just phoned in parts of the implementation.

 

Appreciate the review. I was just wondering how resolving the audio system that used in the double-blind test was? If it was a decent system the difference between the MP3 and the original track should have been obvious. As the RX8 audio system is not very resolving then MP3's should certainly sound every bit as good (or bad) as the original.

P.S. Is the iPod just about the greatest thing in the history of the world or what?

 

No, you're not the only one, and this weird behaviour has been discussed before. You can simulate a single-track skip by pressing RDM twice - the first time turns it off, and the second both turns it on and selects a random track, as you have found.

 

Well, I should commend you for taking the time to write all that out. Thanks for that.

In short, the drawbacks how I see them:
Lag time: When you first put in an MP3 disk. Otherwise, wait time is acceptable.

Shuffle: It should shuffle the entire contents of the MP3 disk not only the current directory.
What the hell, 500 clams!.. maybe your review would have been more positive if you had purchased the MP3 Player for $263 like many here have.

I agree with many of your other assessments, Random button etc..

Overall, the MP3 Player kicks the living azz out of the standard CD Player. I can live with drawbacks and be happy, but like everybody else some improvement would have been appreciated.

 

drawbacks:
- you have to press the "Disp" button to scroll through artist, album, file name, etc. i think it should just display the id3 automatically instead of having to press that the first time you insert the disc

- folder up and folder down are not standard buttons on the steering wheel. i've gotten quite accustomed to doing everything on the steering wheel

- id3 display doesn't scroll to the right automatically revealing the entended title...you have to turn the text **** to see the rest of the word/sentence...i think it should be automatic like on Winamp

other than that it's well worth the $260 i paid for it...i can't possibly see using the normal CD player after you've had one

 

It was part of the purchase of the car; I either got it for "free" or I got a free car when I bought a really expensive MP3 player. I probably would not have paid more than $200 for it on my own.

No you can't. That re-sets the random list, so you may end up hearing a song that you've already heard. Combined with the "I never want to hear this song," it doesn't work well.

Pretty good; B&W speakers, high-end Sony receiver and CD player. A lot of people think that they can tell the difference; very few people actually can -- particularly in an environment like a car. If you want, I can send you a CD of a song encoded in various ways and challenge you to pick out which track was the original. I have one with "Silent Lucidity" on it; let me know if you want something different.


Pretty damn good. Of course, that's why it's so frickin' expensive.

 

Hi lbrintle,
Thanks again for the comments and your explanation about the price you paid for the player, that does help me understand your position better. Also my response did sound a bit more direct than I intended, glad you didn't take that way.

About the random thing, I remember reading that it's truly random. Meaning, you could still end up hearing the same song twice regardless in standard RDM mode. Anyways, I got used to it, when I hear a song I don't like I automatically push the RDM twice (what else can we do, it's the only way to stay in RDM mode). Agreed, it could have been engineered better!

 

Unless yours is somehow unique, it makes no difference. I (and others) have observed that the Random function is truly random, not a shuffle mode. I.e. the next selection could be any track on the disk, regardless of whether you've heard it before, or how long ago. It's entirely possible that you will hear the same track multiple times before you hear another particular track - in one extreme case someone reported that it played the same track twice, and then again after one other track. Turning it off and back on makes no difference to what you'll hear next.

 

Thank you; I didn't know that. I'll use the double-RDM trick from here on out, and add "pining for a shuffle mode" to the very bottom of my wish list for car improvements.

 

...this pretty much summarizes why I will install my current Neo car MP3-player (20 GB hard drive) when I'll get my RX-8. That one does everything you found lacking in the stock Mazda MP3 player very nicely. And I don't even need to burn MP3s on CDs and I don't need to shuffle those MP3 CDs either. :D

Trouble is, that I will have to get the factory radio modified to accept an external source, but that can be done. I would love to have an AUX input on the factory radio, but no stock unit I know of has that feature, so the only way is modding.

 

Thanks for the review, lbrintle -- it was very informative!

That's why I'm putting my $263 towards an iPod instead of buying the Mazda MP3 player as I was planning. I've wanted an iPod for a while now anyway, was just looking for an excuse to buy one! :D

 

I can't wait until shop manuals come out for the car. Imagine if Mazda implemented something like the BMW I bus (http://www.openbmw.org/bus/).

 

Sweet. My mouth gets wet thinking about it.

Here's hoping that Mazda's engineering team is made up of Open Source Software fans...

 

I don't know of the sound quality from your systems/speakers, but 128kbps doesn't sound very good. 160 is getting there, and 192 is excellent..