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 DUO-Arin
Digital E Cassette
Originally posted on October
4th, 2001
MP3 in the form of a cassette tape
When I saw this in the store
I thought Wow! Way Cool.
At $199 its not cheap. In fact
its the most expensive MP3 player you'll find for the memory
and functions it has. But that ever alluring familiar shape of
the cassette tape and all my dusty devices around the house pushed
me on.
Opened the box (nice box), loaded
the software and plugged in the Duo to my USB port on the back
of my laptop... It detected the device and found the driver on
the supplied CDROM. I rebooted and...
loaded Windows Media Player
and WHAM! GPF error... on Windows 2000 no less...
Hmmmmmm....
Well so much for that idea I
thought. Well, I'll just load the software that the Duo came
with and try that. It was pretty easy. It loaded without fuss.
I then started dragging and dropping MP3s and WMA files to the
memory of the Duo. I hit the transfer button and the files downloaded
fairly quickly. I noticed that WMA files (windows proprietary
format) downloaded much faster and they are smaller so you can
put almost twice as many WMA files on the unit than MP3 files.
After I finished loading the
files, I unplugged the the Duo from the USB cord and popped it
into my new VW Eurovan's cassette player...
Neato I thought. Dave Matthews
was playing quite nicely then... I heard a strange popping sound
(mechanical) coming from the cassette tape (Duo unit). Every
2 seconds, this clicking sound came from the Duo. I let the songs
play on hoping this would go away.
Nope.
I noticed it was very noticeable
when my classical music started playing. You could really hear
the clicking sound coming from the Duo.
I don't like it. I was going
to keep this little buddy and I really thought it would be cool
but I'm disappointed. Not only did it crash my Windows Media
Player (and all my playlists, and settings) resetting my Media
Player but that damn clicking sound really drove me nuts.
I couldn't get Media Player to work. After unloading their software/drivers
it still didn't work. Frustrated after 3 hours from diagnosing
this, I used an older Ghost copy of my operating system to restore
my laptop. I could never get Media Player to work right. And
yes, I lost all my playlists and settings in WMP. This really
ticked me off!
So... I can only give this thing
a  rating.
Sorry guys. I really thought
it would be better.
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