RSSCommodore Makes Comeback with Mpet II
By Ed Oswald | Published March 14, 2005, 2:41 PM
REVIEW Most of us who have been around technology for the better part of the last two decades will remember the name Commodore. Commodore computers were the best selling PCs of the 1980s. However, as Microsoft took center stage, the company faded away, eventually being bought by Dutch company Tulip Computers after filing for bankruptcy in 1994.
Enter a U.S. firm called Yeahronimo Media Ventures, a company which specializes in electronic entertainment. The group said last year that it planned to take the Commodore brand and make it "a worldwide entertainment concept," and the Mpet II is the first item to be shipped with that goal in mind.
The Mpet is a Flash memory-based MP3 player that comes in two sizes, 256MB and 512MB, retailing for $99 and $139, respectively. After the announcement of the player's launch earlier this year, BetaNews decided to see exactly what Yeahronimo had in mind for the Commodore brand.
The packaging is pretty simple, and includes the Mpet II, a pair of headphones, a lanyard, and a supplied AA battery. The player itself is very utilitarian; it does remind you of the design of the old Commodore machines. However, it works and fits nicely in the hand.
There is practically no weight to the unit, so using the lanyard to wear the Mpet won't be an issue - you will barely feel it. The headphones are of decent quality, and really what is to be expected of a lower-priced MP3 player.
What I was very impressed with is the screen. Although for some visually impaired the smaller text may be tough to read, it actually is surprisingly useful compared with other small MP3 players. The uselessness of a small screen is the main reason why Apple's iPod Shuffle came without one, but Commodore has actually made it useful enough that the size doesn't become a problem.
Sound quality is as to be expected with a Flash player. I found myself turning on the equalizer to get better, and louder, sound. With the equalizer on the sound quality is not bad; however, I did have an issue with there only being five options: Bass/Treble boost, Rock, Pop, Jazz, and Classical.
What really sets this unit apart, and what I think will be an overall net positive for most potential buyers, is the Mpet II's feature set. For $139, you get a 512MB audio player that is compliant with Microsoft's WMA DRM (not Napster-to-Go or "Janus" DRM, but all other services), an FM tuner, and a voice recorder. For the voice recorder feature you have the option to use an external microphone.
What I did not experience is the horror stores of synchronization with Windows Media Player. While WMP is not as intuitive as Apple's iTunes (I find the fact that it detects an MP3 player as a hard drive a bit confusing), it worked fine for me. I will say that it was tedious having to tell Windows Media Player what to synchronize, rather than having the software do it automatically for me.
So will we once again be living the Commodore life with the Mpet II?
The Good: The Mpet II has an impressive feature set for the price. While it certainly won't be a Shuffle-killer, it adds a lot to the Windows-based player market at a competitive price. And for nostalgic techies, this is a dream come true: Commodore is back.
The Bad: The sound could be a whole lot better. Some music just doesn't sound right on the factory equalizer settings. However, if you are looking for sound quality, I suggest a more pricey hard drive based player.
The Bottom Line: If you want a Windows Media based audio player, and don't feel like breaking the bank, or don't care about Napster to Go, the Mpet II is more than worth it. The unit is certainly priced to be competitive as soon as it enters the U.S. market later this year.
commodore much that we loved it in the 80s is dead and nothing is going to revive it.
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|$139 is really expensive for a 512MB flash player...they can be easily had for less than $100 for the ones with screen and FM tuner.
http://www.amazon.com/ex.../tg/detail/-/B0006HJATO/
Or rechargable for just little more
http://www.amazon.com/ex.../tg/detail/-/B00067KZ8E/
I'm sure there are better deals out there as well.
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|Well, to be fair, $139 is the MSRP. MuVo's original MSRP was somewhere in the $199 range, but has since gone down. So $119 is probably exactly where the Mpet II will be priced online upon its release.
Still, I would spend the extra $20 and go for an iPod Shuffle anyway for design and sound quality reasons. After all, MuVo's screen is pretty useless, even if it looks a lot better than the Commodore.
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|Blah, blah, blah. Spend the extra bucks and get an iPod. AAC and MP3 are better then WMA and OGG and the rest of the other bulls*** formats. Quit being cheap and get the good s***.
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|I'm with you to an extent on getting a "decent" player - most flash-based devices lack what I see as crucial functions (gapless playback, decent indexing of music etc), and are also way too low-capacity for my liking. Still, I can see a number of arguments for having them. They're much more skip-proof and robust than HD-based players, and they're significantly smaller and lighter.
MP3 and AAC are better than WMA and OGG? That's not an opinion I've come across in any comparative listening tests. HydrogenAudio.org have done a series of ABX double-blind listening tests, and the last time I checked, OGG came out on top in most tests, with Nero's AAC coming out fairly well, WMA admittedly not doing so great, iTunes AAC not faring too badly (middle of the pack), and MP3 coming out bottom in some tests and faring well in others. MP3 is a standard, but like most incumbents, it's a lowest common denominator format which doesn't take into account many of the advances in perceptual audio encoding. OGG has advantages in filesize and audio quality, but loses out on required processing power. WMA seems to be an okay-ish middle ground (for certain types of music, and with a few caveats I've forgotten) and AAC, as a proprietary and closed format with multiple encoders implementations (similar to the way MP3), is heavily dependent on the encoder used. I've seen evidence (again, primarily on HydrogenAudio.org) that the iTunes AAC encoder used to be the better encoder, now the Nero encoder is very decent.
It's all swings and roundabouts, but I'm sticking with OGG and FLAC for all my encoded stuff, not least because OGG's the only format to natively support gapless playback. LAME's MP3 encoder can stick extra info in the frame headers to allow this though, and I don't know whether AAC or WMA can, but I've seen no evidence of it.
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|man $139 is was expensive.
about £45 (approx US$80) gets you about the same thing.
http://www.ebuyer.com/cu...3&product_uid=81586
http://www.ebuyer.com/cu...3&product_uid=83017
the commodore "brand" has no more merit now than other "unbranded" gear. 10 years ago, maybe, now... nah!
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|Ok. I guess I stand corrected on the issue of MP3 vs. OGG. I'm not actually experienced with OGG but I do know that I wouldn't use MP3 if there was a more popular format that was better in quality. I say AAC is great in comparison to MP3 but in the case of other formats excluding WMA, I just don't know.
Most of my music is pirated and the popular shared format is MP3. Anything I rip is in to AAC.
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|I'm definitely in agreement that AAC (when encoded right, using a modern bit of software) is better than MP3. WMA's not great for high-quality, high-bandwidth applications, but I've been pretty impressed with the quality available when streaming lower-bandwidth stuff like 64 and 96 kbps streams. That seems to be where MS have targeted it.
I only have 2 illegal albums - both of which aren't available in the UK without paying really hideous import prices. All the rest of my music is ripped from CD (in OGG format for my Rio Karma), legal digital download, ripped from the radio (where possible from a digital satellite feed), or from live shows or promos etc. I'm not hugely moralistic about it, or even particularly bothered by the legal implications. I just personally feel that it's worth me buying music.
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