Freecom Mini CD / MP3 player > Reviews (6)

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 music CDs and take them with you.

You can also use it with 8cm CD-RWs, so you could use it to transfer computer files about with too on the same CD if you want.

It's reasonably small, however, it is quite thick, so it can be uncomfortable in your pocket.

You put albums into different directories, so despite not being able to read any ID3 tags it does differentiate between albums. Navigating them isn't hard, but it is tedious - you have to skip through each song to get to the next album, and when you play an album it will automatically go on to the next one (if there is a next one) so you can't get it to just play one album and then stop.

It's also slightly tempramental. Occasionally I receive "No Disc" messages - you can fix by stopping and restarting but it is annoying.

The other annoying thing is that inbetween each song is a little "pop". You can't tell on external speakers, but if you're a perfectionist this might annoy you.

In its day this was a good little player but compared to newer players it doesn't offer much unless you're getting a very good bargain.