Freecom Mini CD / MP3 player

Well it has been a while since I last wrote an opinion but it feels good to be back. It looks like there have been a lot of changes here, but one thing that it is clear that has not changed is the friendliness of the members. Anyway, I have recently purchased the new Freecom Beatman Mp3CD player which is apparently the only one of its kind. You may be thinking that you have seen hundreds of Mp3CD players so what’s new about this one. Well I will tell you. The CD's that it plays are only 8cm in diameter which lets you fit this handy little player in your pocket unlike usual Mp3CD players ... more

I got this player in August of 2001. It would be an excellent player, but lacks in features when compared to other players of the day. I do like the mini CD idea and as I like to hoard my music collection, it gave me the ability to haul round more than 3 times as much as my friend on his 64mb YEPP. However, the beatman is quite thick so users who have had a solid state player before are going to find it rather bulky. Personally, coming off a CD player onto an Mp3 player, I wasn't to fussed. It fits into my jacket pocket ok and isn't all that heavy. The mini CDs are great and for a little extra ... more

The Freecom Beatman is a fairly decent little Mp3 player. It takes 8cm CDs, which hold 185 Meg of data. This means it holds about 22 minutes of CD Audio, or at 128 Kb/s MP3 about 2 hours 45 minutes of music. It includes a key-lock switch, analogue volume control, and a preset equaliser. It looks good enough, the sound quality is very good (even when connected up to proper Hi-Fi speakers), and the cost per megabyte of memory is very cheap. For long journeys or PCs where you don't have lots of spare harddisk space for hundreds of albums this sort of player might be for you. You can burn lots of ... more

The Beatman is quite an achievement in that it allows you to transport up to 4 hours of music on 1 CD. To do this all I needed to do was write my MP3s onto a 210 MB Mini CD-R (these are 8 cm CDs which Freecom also manufacture). With my first attempt I fitted 34 tracks totalling about 3 hours of music. I was a bit disappointed because the CDs claim "up to" 4 hours. I first tried out the Beatman on a coach trip and I really appreciated it. At last I could listen to my choice of tracks virtually non-stop without having to reach into my bag to change CDs. However I got to be a bit disappointed ... more

The beatman is designed to play mini cd's which are just a smaller version of a cd, they have a 185MB of capacityand roughly i think it works out to be about 210 minutes worth of music. Because they are just smaller versions of cd's they are cheaper than mini disks and they are sold in most computer shops. The actual shape is aesthetically interesting with a transparent blue cover with a simple interface which has the basic stop, play fast forward and rewind. On top of this there are funciotns such as repeat, program, intro and eq. The player has a useful 40 seconds of anti shock adn the ... more