The Pine SM-200C mp3cd Player
It was in September 1999 that Pine announced the D'Music SM-200C, a portable CD player that would recognize MP3s--the first of its kind! At a time when MP3-playing options that provided more than 32MB were scarce, the concept of carrying around 10 hours of music in our jacket pocket left us drooling.
Well, almost a year has passed and the drool has dried. Pine repeatedly postponed, delayed, put off and moved up the release of the SM-200C (originally slated for November '99), allowing competitors to step in and beat them to the table. But the SM-200C had an ace up its sleeve: ID3 tag display. And now, at long last, as we hold this unit in our hands, we bow humbly in the presence of the mighty SM-200C.
A portable CD player that displays the artist and title of the song it's playing may not seem like much more than a quirky perk. After all, normal CD players don't display more than a track number and no one ever seemed to mind. But dealing with more than 100 songs on a single CD, you may feel differently. You need only to imagine a cabinet full of unlabeled canned goods to put the confusion into perspective.
The unit has four standard control buttons--play/pause and stop (which also serve as power on and off) and FF and REW (press to skip, hold to scan--and four additional function buttons: EQ, scan, repeat and anti-shock.
The five-band EQ gives you choice of five presets: pop, jazz, classical, ex-bass and flat. Scan cycles through short snippets of each song. And pressing repeat switches between single-song, full-CD-repeat and random modes.
We used the random mode as a way of jumping to songs deep into a CD without having to pound on the FF button 50 times. Thankfully, the folks at Pine clued us in to a better way: When a song is paused, pressing FF or REW will skip ten songs.
In our testing, the unit had no problem auto-detecting and reading regular audio CDs, MP3 CD-Rs, and MP3 CD-RWs. On mixed-data CDs, it picked out the MP3s from among the clutter and simply ignored the other files on the CD (including other non-MP3 music files). The SM-200C manual claims it supports files encoded from 32kbps to 192kbps, but played our 256kbps test files without a hiccup.
On one 141-song CD we tested, eight tracks gave the unit trouble and were skipped over for no apparent reason. But that success rate (95 percent) is about as high as we've seen. It found tracks within subdirectories, but when playing CDs burned with both MP3s and regular CD audio, it would only recognize one format (whichever was burned on the inside part of the CD). The SM-200C supports CDs of up to 200 tracks.
The SM-200C curiously played the tracks in alphabetical order--somewhat annoying in two ways. First, you have no control of your playlist order. Second, it will play all your "Beatles"-tagged songs first, except for the handful of songs tagged as "The Beatles," which it plays later.
[Note: This varies depending on the CD-burning software used. Alphabetical results come from using programs like Nero Burning Rom and Hot Burn, but can be avoided by using Adaptec.]
Physically, the unit is something to behold. Measuring 130 by 142 by 30mm (about 5 inches square, 1 inch deep), it's very sharp-looking and well-designed. The package includes earphones, an AC adapter, line-out cable, rechargeable battery (with built-in recharger), user manual, sample music CD and MusicMatch jukebox software.
The unit runs on two AA batteries, or on the rechargeables provided. We got about three to four hours out of our batteries, with songs recognized with less frequency as the batteries began to wear down.
The anti-shock mechanism provided a few less skips than we expected. But the results were not extraordinary and somewhat inconsistent. The unit is ideal for walking, not jogging. And when driving, try to steer clear of potholes. As with the Philips eXpanium, the fact that the anti-shock can't be disabled when playing MP3 CDs causes some degree of battery drain. But the anti-shock performance when playing regular audio CDs was phenomenal. You literally could play basketball with it--using the SM-200C as the basketball.