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Freecom Beatman MP3 player

Introduction

Every couple of months, a new invention arrives in the MP3 player market. It started with Diamond's Rio and the flash memory card, followed by the DiscMan that can read MP3 burned on a CD, then the harddisk, then SONY's Memory Stick, and finally, some companies came to the smart idea to re-discover a decades-old technology, the Mini-CD. The Freecom Beatman is one of the first such drives on the market.

What's a Mini-CD? It's the same as your everyday CD, just with a smaller diameter (8 cm vs 12 cm), thus holds less data (185 MB vs 650 MB). Though uninteresting for the Audio CD format (who wants a CD that holds only 3-5 tracks?), in combination with the MP3 technology it became suddenly interesting: thanks to the high compression rate of MP3 files, such a small CD (about the size of a MiniDisc) can hold nearly 3x the music a "large" CD can in Audio CD format (210 min vs 74 min). Cool? You bet. Especially that it's a drive you can hold in your palm... and with a weight of 170 g (without batteries), it's certainly not too heavy to carry around in a pocket.

How to fill your player with music

Here comes the tricky part: to be able to use your Mini-CD MP3 player, you need a CD writer that can handle Mini-CDs. And here comes all the hype and lies and dirt of the industry... Freecom states everywhere (among them on the package of every single Mini-CD) that its Mini-CDs are "compatible with all CD-RW recorders". Too bad my Plextor 8x/2x/20x SCSI CD-RW couldn't recognize them - and it's not even a 1st generation CD-RW drive! And Plextor is one of the best in the industry. How many other drives might be out there that can't write on these Mini-CDs? I tried prety much everything:

• I upgraded the firmware of my CD-RW to the latest one from the Plextor site - still no go.
• I contacted Plextor support - they told me none of the SCSI CD-RW drives support Mini-CDs, not even the newest model that's currently sold... They told me the latest 2 IDE models (the 16x and 24x) are the only ones with support for these media. This is a bad joke... That's definitely not what I would await from this company. It's a sure thing that next time I make a Plextor review I'll deduct a whole grade from the score for this story - you can never know when your Plextor drive won't support something new in the future and their support dept will tell you they're sorry and good-bye.
• I contacted Freecom support about the compatibility issue and asked them which drives are truly compatible - and never got a reply of any kind. That's a whole grade from the score of this review... And next time I'll think twice before I buy anything from Freecom. This company doesn't take its customers seriously so why should I take them any more serious?