I'm Kewler than You Think (!)

Behold! My new SHE-F18P MP3 Music player!


This little baby brings me into that hallowed land of people who possess hardware digital audio players! Well, these days that's about almost everybody, and so nothing "kewl" about it, but who goes for technicalities anyway?

It's a 1GB player with MP3/WAV support. Unfortunately. Why did I get this? Well, it was gifted to me, and I couldn't refuse a freebie. I had my eyes on the Cowon iAudio family of players, which would have set me back a couple of thousand bucks, but no price can beat FREE when it comes to a poor student :)

Removable LiIon battery, with both wall and USB-based charging, support for about a dozen languages---it started up in Traditional Chinese! (This is probably why I got it!) I concentrated and hit the right buttons, and there was the French interface! Soon after there was the English interface. Some fumbling on part, Japanese followed by German/Deutsch and then finally English. I bet I can now do this in my sleep now.

In other notable features, supports LRC (Lyric files), can display text files as well, easy USB transfer mechanism (though seems very very slow on the download path). Notable anti-features: MP3-only support (no OGG!), doesn't seem to support M3U playlists (haven't tried PLS), no FM radio (though the manual does hint at FM support, I can't read Chinese!) and tacky buttons.

Amarok seems pretty happy with it, though it does seem to have it's own individual ideas of how to place files (configurable, of course), though the player doesn't seem to mind. But I do want playlist support.

As another sweet thing, I also got that old 256MB player that I lugged around once or twice in Jan 2006 (remember?), which means I can get down to reverse engineering it. My folks were kind enough to send rechargeable batteries and a charger too!

It does have firmware upgrade support, but I doubt the manufacturer has released anything at all. Retails for 199 Yuan (around 1200 rupees) in Walmart China I suppose.

Now I can get down to practising for Marathon 2008!

Update: It does play OGG! I've never been so happy to be wrong! Can't seem to read the metadata, but who cares (for now)! Note that the OGG support isn't advertised anywhere, it justed started playing the files! Whoo-hoo!

[Photo courtesy: NP]