GPX BA1000-5 5GB MP3 WMA Player Jukebox

Rating:
Summary: Do Not Buy This
Review: I bought the BA1000 from another electronic store and there are some things that the prospective purchaser of this product really needs to know. I am summarizing what I have found through web searches and chats about this product and there are some things that definitely need attention before you pick this product up.

It has some great features but many of them don't work correctly without some tinkering with the mp3 player. But it can be a good player for the money (I'm not sure I'd pay $199 for it though), if you're not into tinkering with stuff, PASS THIS ONE BY AND GET AN IPOD/DELL JUKEBOX OR SOMETHING EASIER. I really like the FM player, the capacity is good (5gb is plenty for me), and the encoder is pretty cool too but each needs to be tweaked. Alright this is going to be splotchy but hang on.

The software is ok, there are 3 tricks I have found to getting the info onto the BA1000. The device (to my knowlege) only recognizes MP3's, NOT WMA's. This is a pain if (like me) you use the media player to get your music onto your hard drive, get a ripper that will burn your cd's to mp3's. The second is you have to enable the write caching of the BA1000. With the BA1000 USB plugged in, go to the control panel, click on system, go to the hardware tab, then go to the device manager. Open the disk drive tree, right click on Bantam BA1000 USB device, go to properties and select 'optimize for performance'. That will make your downloads really fast. If you don't do this, downloads are slower than USB 1.1. Here's the third thing. Once you have enabled the write caching, MAKE SURE TO USE THE 'SAFE REMOVE HARDWARE' FUNCTION ON THE TOOLBAR (bottom right) OR BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!!

Next, if you have lock-up problems call Bantams customer support and they will give you directions on how to delete some of the files so they stop happening. You can find this if you search it out but it is safer to call them and have them walk you through it. If it does crash though, there is a reset mini button you can press with a pin and this will free it up, don't worry, it won't erase all of your songs.

The encoder is cool but here are some tips. If you try to record FM right off of the BA1000, as soon as there is a small pause in the songs, or the DJ's voice, it makes a new file, this is a pain because you get a hundred FM files and most of them are a total waste. Your best bet is to use the line in jack. I use the line in to record baseball games (nerdy huh...) from my little AM radio to listen to without commercials later on. That way you get just one BIG file. But don't worry, the 5gb has been plenty big for me. Oh! To get it to start recording, you have to press the round POWER OFF button. Bantam, help me figure that one out please!

I haven't played with the voice record but the impression I get is that using an external mic to the line in is the best way to go if you want to record a lecture or something like that. I hear it will segment the lecture if the lecturer pauses though so it might not work out the best.

There are some other little funky things about it, like I don't think the shuffle works, it sort of plays the same 15-20 songs over when I had about 500 on it. Here's another one, the BA1000 will turn on each time you remove or plug in the headphones. I have no idea why and what is going on. It even does it when the 'hold' key is enabled.

I'm sure there is more, I guess the moral of the story is this thing has tons of little quirks, it is not very intuitive, it is moody and requires quite a bit of attention. I paid much less than $200 for this product and wouldn't consider it at this price. I have heard some inklings that the hard drive in the machine itself is pretty valuable but I am not into these enough to try to take it apart. Overall, it will work for me until I get fed up with it and get a mini IPOD. I hope this helps!




Rating:
Summary: Features made me buy it, quality made me return it.
Review: Initially, I opted to get the Bantam 5Gb model since it was blessed with more features than the iPod mini (which I was also considering). Built in radio, voice recorder, direct MP3 encoding, and to top it all off, it's $50 cheaper than the iPod mini. Who could ask for more, right? Wrong.
It all starts when you take the device out of the packaging. The Bantam is relatively bulky and heavy. The buttons are all positioned much like your typical personal cassette player with the typical play/pause, forward, reverse running along the side of the length of the Bantam. The left/right scrolling button, however, is positioned on the bottom. Very discomforting, in my opinion. You'll see that this isn't a single handed device.
Now, when you pop in the accompanying CD that conatins the Bantam Media Manager software and Bantam drivers you'll quickly notice that the CD is "corrupted". I repeated on two more computers, same result. It turns out that there are many people out there who have had the same problem. It could be that all accompanying disks are faulty, as I have yet to read about someone who has succesfully installed the program from the included disk. Luckily, it can be downloaded from their website as a mere 17 Mb file. The software is pretty easy to use, much more so, I.M.O. than Apple's iTunes.
Now, after finally getting it to work, one of the first things I noticed, was that the songs transfer slow. REAL SLOW. Slower than USB 1.1 slow. Thankfully, the other reviewer has a found a way to increase the transfer speeds.
After transferring about 500 songs, it became quite a pain to look them up in the Bantam. While you can search by song, album, artist, etc. scrolling through the lists is a pain. Your position on the Bantam scrolls by moving the scroll button left or right (or up and down for those who see that way). Pushing it in serves as the select button. Holding it in a left/right position will make the list scroll in that direction, but you probably WILL NOT KNOW where you are at in the list, as the screen freezes while you do this, until you let go of the scroll button. It seems to land in a random spot at first, but it is actually a time-based function. Users that get used to it will probably learn when to stop scrolling to get to a desired postion, but newbies won't.
As far as audio quality is concerned, I personally like the audible output. I happen to like to listen to very loud music and the Bantam certainly can play music load. Very loud indeed at max volume; in fact, it is significantly louder than what I get out of an iPod at max volume (note: I will be comparing the Bantam to the 4th generation 20Gb iPod). The clarity is comparibale to that of the iPod as well, though the Bantam can geberate more bass. I have the Fontopia earbuds from Sony (MDR-EX71SL) and they are the best earbuds under $50 so I did not bother to test the included earbuds. I'm sure they wouldn't compare though. I also like the way the display screen is configured while playing (song title, album, artist, 2 next upcoming songs, and nifty bar equilizer). I generally listen to music loud and with the equilizer on, so it is impossible for me to achieve the indicated battery life but I will testify that I can play it longer than the iPod with the same settings.
As far as additional features go, the built-in devices work OK. I say OK because: (1) the radio isn't all that impressive. Tunning to a frequency, changing it, and then returning to that orignal frequency is difficult. Also, the sound quality of the radio is not that impressive (when compared to other digitally tuned radios) (2) the voice recording and MP3 encoder sound just plain terrible. Also, on my Bantam, it stops recording when no noise is detected on the mic. This gives you a bunch of MP3 files that may be minutes or seconds long, instead of just having one long file.
All praises and little nick picks aside, what finally drew me out is the Bantam's build quality. Everytime the battery indicator changed, it made the player freeze for about a second. Some may say that that is nothing to complain about, but when I am playing music and I get a pause, I find it very annoying. Be aware that THIS DEVICE LIKES TO FREEZE and that you'll pretty much have to do alot of resetting. Is it coincidence that the instructions for reseting is also on the cover of the manual? It got to the point where it froze permanently on me just one week after I purchased it. I could not reset it, and draining the battery and refilling it was no help. Alas, stupid me, I threw away the receipt, and Bantam customer service said they would replace it for $100 bucks. Now I have to cough up a total of $300 for an iffy piece of equipment that I could have gotten an iPod for? What a rip off.
So the jurisdiction: I loved the audio playback and the screen display. Loud and forceful, just how I like em. They're the only reasons why I gave this device 3 stars instead of 1. I can only pray that GPX/Bantam will have new firmwares ready to correct the flaws in the Bantam 1000 MP3 player. But be warned. Be ready. For whatever reasons, if you do decide to get this, don't lose that receipt.

Rating:
Summary: Do Not Buy This
Review: My husband and I each purchased one. Both of our software discs were corrupted so we downloaded from the site directly. Then my husbands wouldn't accept any transfers, so we returned it. Mine was working so we kept it. Then the next day mine started acting up. It would freeze then no longer respond to anything I did. It wouldn't even turn off. Luckiy I have all packaging and will return.