Reviews Written by PeterPuma

Perfect for my needs

Pros: fresh content all the time. can record hours of XM, then delete annoying commericals. great organizing tools.plays my current mp3s

Cons: dull sound quality, cant play itunes bought tracks (but who can, other than ipod),

I have always owned ipods, which are great. but I can only listen to the same songs so many times. I have never been into stealing music, so it was costing me a lot to be constantly buying songs. and knowing what to buy has always been sketchy with me. I have XM in my car and really dig it. When I saw this it made a lot of sense.
At first I thought it was a live player and was dissapointed. but after thinking about it, it was still better than investing in a new ipod. (I have a psp for movies, so I dont need that part of it)
I download hours upon hours of music. every so often I sync it with my computer and delete everything less than 2 minutes long. I also go through and lock any tracks I want to keep.
The napster interface is a little weak. there are no real search functions, other than choosing which column sorts things (time, artist, channel...). I was surprised that the music is never downloaded to the computer. i was looking forward to burning cd's and having the tracks on my hard drive. this does not let you do that. But I understand why they do it. Although it shows you what songs are on there, it points you to a :30 second clip on napter and encourages you to buy it.
The sound quality is not great, but my primary use is the gym and it is fine for that. Every once in a while I hook it up to my car (via the headdphone jack and a cassette adapter) and its just fine. but not crisp. the eq settings are all useless, except max boost, which I always have on.
The best thing about it is the ability to have tons of music. all styles. all the time. If you don't like a song, simply delete or skip it. when you record, it will overwrite any unlocked tracks once it fills up. so I am never too stressed over space management. When I hear a song I want to keep, I simply lock it with 2 simple keystrokes.
I have it set to 50/50. so I get 25 hours of XM content and half a gig for mp3's. I wish they would let me choose the amounts, but the only option is all XM or 50/50.
My last thought is that it is a good way to record shows you like. I like opie and anthony. since I'm on the west coast I can set a timer for 3am-7am. then on my drive to work I can listen to it without commercials or breaks. as well as skip segments that bore me. I like being in control of my content ...