Oracom ORC-200 256 MB

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Good
Ease of Use	Very Easy
Look & Design	Good
Range of Features	Diverse
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Great size, portability, and ruggedness
Disadvantages:	See review .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Oracom ORC-200 128MB MP3 (MP3 only) Player www.oracom.co.kr

INTRODUCTION:
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Firstly this is a MP3 player with 128 MB onboard (non expandable) memory. In essence the music on your computer encoded using MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) encoding can be taken off your computer hard drive and onto this little device where you can listen to them as if it was a cd player or cassette player etc.

I was first looking for a present for a friend of mine when I cam across these, and thought what a great idea! Being a fraction of the size of a bulky and outdated (but much loved) cassette player and being more portable than a rather fragile and still expensive personal CD player. So I decided to look into them a little bit more, this was about 10 months ago, so this review is based on my experience using this over that period of time.

FEATURES:
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128 MB internal memory ( around 90 floppy disks and around 40+ songs depending on encoding bit rates. For non techie people the number of songs depends on what compression you save them as, e.g. 128kbps 44.1 khz is the general standard.)

BUT YOU CAN NOT ONLY JUST SAVE MP3’S ON THERE! IT IS ALSO A MEMORY STICK TO TRANSPORT FILES UPTO 128 MB’S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This of course depends on how much free space you have. You are notified of how much free space you have each time it loads up and does a memory check. This is kind of its way of “booting” up.

Stereo playback via headphones, but as it’s a standard 1/8th of an Inch jack you can connect speakers to it as well, or use it as a line out of the player and connect it to another device if doing real time recording from one to another.

Uses only 1xAAA battery, which supposedly gets around 10hours of playback, but I get less, due to it being turned on and off etc, as well as skipping tracks, and the back light on lots which often takes up the most battery life so set the amount of time it is on to the minimum.

USB 1.1 (NOT USB 2.0) supported with plug and play operation. I.e. it needs no additional drivers when being used on Windows 98, 2000, ME, or XP or MAC 8.6 + or Linux Kernel 2.4.0 + The problem with it only being USB 1.1 and not the faster USB 2.0 means that it takes a little while longer to transfer tunes over to it / other data.

Plays only MP3 files, not .wav, .wma or other formats. I suggest that if you have many windows media audio files (wma) then you obtain the free program dB Power Amp to convert them from WMA to MP3 works like a dream! The link for FREE download = http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm As it says, its FREE so what are you waiting for? I often find with very low bit rates (the amount of data used per second for music information) WMA does better than MP3 but hey we can’t have it our way all the time it’s only a basic player.

Voice recording function. There is a minute microphone towards one of the ends of the player where the neck loop attaches, and believe me its very sensitive, which can be a bad thing but I have used it often for recording lectures where I might need to refer back to something not in my notes. (To convert the special file it generates on the player you need the installed software!)

I tried to record a music concert I went to see on it, and the mic was just overloaded, and the sound was awful even running it through filters and all sorts I wasn’t gonna get a good result. Just letting you know. I think that it’s more useful for just little memo’s and notes to yourself. This function could be used as a basic Dictaphone.

OSD (on screen display) with back light is sooo cool! This is the launch pad for finding all the options and even though it’s a small player you can control and personalise so much! The main items displayed on the front when being used in either MP3 play back, or voice file play back are the “mode” just mentioned, also battery status with the track number out of the total number of tracks. There is also the songs title with what “EQ” you have selected, the repeat status and playing time.

As I said there are many menus but they are easily navigated round, and it only took me about 10seconds to get the jist of getting around them. It really is nice and simple, as I often change settings and other things whilst jogging on the treadmill.

The menus are:

REPEAT = choose from random playback (shuffle), repeat a specific list, repeat all, normal (where it plays back each song in turn), repeat one track over and over, intro playback where only the first 10seconds of a song is played. The last one is a bit pointless in my mind.

EQ FUNCTIONS = Here you can set a user defined EQ with +/- treble and bass settings, I find that bass full, and treble ¾ is the best setting. There is also a generic setting which is just un-eq’ed.

FILE = Here you can delete off files you no longer want, but only the music ones! Or you can format the whole thing where ALL data is lost, this is basically like a factory reset.

LOGO = There is a start up logo which can be edited using the supplied software, so you can customise the player, but I didn’t both plus the default uses no extra memory unlike the other images you save, even though it’s negligible. Here you can also set the player so it uses the logo like a “screen saver” during operation”

DISPLAY = Here you can set the back light’s duration of time being on, best to keep it short to save on the ole battery life! Also the contrast of the screen can be adjusted. Scroll speed of the track title is adjusted here to be slower or faster. Extra information on a specific track can be found under this menu to such as a files 1) Bit rate, 2) Sample frequency 3) File size in Mega bytes and 4) Playing time.

TEMPO = This is a GREAT feature on this player that allows the user to easily increase the speed of a song or slow it down. The increasing comes in handy when you need music to jog to, speeding it up gives you something to pace yourself to. Slowing it down is a godsend when trying to learn languages so that you can listen to it carefully and catch even subtle nuisances.

(NB: You can also set the default volume keys to be re-assigned to tempo + and tempo – keys!)

EXIT MENU = By selecting this is takes you back to the main screen display.

SOFTWARE / INSTALLATION:
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Included in this packaging is a mini CD with two programs on it. The first allows you to edit and manipulate pictures to make them into your start up logo / screen saver logo. These are very basic so I didn’t bother using it.

The other program allows you to convert the recorded and stored voice files on the player into .wav files (uncompressed audio) on your computer. This program works fine, however it takes a long time! But this is probably due to the USB 1.1 Speed. The quality for size is good being sampled and saved on the player as 32 kbps 22 KHz Mono audio, so don’t be expecting excellent quality.

This is standard installation procedure and should be no problem. Both programs when installed take up only about 10MB, this can seem quite a bit, and might not be worth it depending how often you are likely to use them.

EXTRA:
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You get given some very low standard headphones which are most peoples first port of calling to replace, of which I did with mine. You also get a USB cable to use, more like an extension cable even though you can plug the unit straight into a USB port. You get the complementary 1 free AAA battery and user manual along with the software CD.

IN USE:
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Having used this player for long journeys, exercise, general pleasure, and as something carry around to listen to when I was revising I have found this to be at most times invaluable, and It spent most of last year in my college coat pocket!

Its user interface is simple; On/Off button also doubling a play/stop button. A skip 1 track forward and a skip one track back, also the useful volume + and volume – buttons. There is also a central button on the top side of the player to enter the menus and to change the player modes from MP3 playback, Recorded media playback and recording mode.

When connecting to the computer it is treated like a removable piece of hardware like an external hard drive or something similar and comes up under the “my computer” open window as the Oracom MP3 player (Note on some systems it will probably come up as “REMOVABLE DISK”. When you double click on it you open a window which has 3 default folders which I advise you NOT TO DELETE! These folders are 1) Logo – where all custom logos are stored, so you can enter this and quickly delete or add pre-made logos. 2) Music – this folder is where you should put all you MP3 files. Any MP3 files outside of this file will not be recognised by the player and will not be available for play back. Lastly 3) Voice – here is where you will find all the voice files that you have recorded.

To transfer files on or off the player in this window and sub windows it’s a simple “drag and drop” method. IT COULDN’T BE EASIER!!!!

When the player is plugged into a USB port or the extensions cable it’s display lights up with “PLAYER <--> STANDBY” and when being accessed it displays “PC <--> PLAYER”.

Make sure that you use the standard “eject” procedure for ejecting this media from the computer ensuring that this way it is safe and no corruption of data / loss or data occurs. For those that don’t know, there is a small icon in the system tray that looks like a small little grey box with a large green arrow over it pointing to the left hand side in an outward motion. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.

When it comes to attaching the player to the computer or changing the battery, all you simply need do is to detach the one half from the other, be gentle at first, but sure enough as you see in the pictures it comes apart so that you can stick the USB part in the computer or remove the battery. This can be a bit fiddly, but ok most of the time.

PRO’s:
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I have got to say that the manual, although not really that necessarily couldn’t have been written much better. All explanations are very clear with lots of pictures to accompany it.

It’s an MP3 Player and combined (shared memory) memory stick. Two cool features in one. This has come in handy on many occasions even though I have had to delete some of my music off of it to make space :-(

Small compact and rugged design is excellent for exercise.

UNLIKE IPOD’s this is not a hard drive as such and thus no matter how much you shake it or move it around it WILL NOT judder or skip parts of a track most often associated with CD players, but the same principle applies to IPODs to. I mean if you drop the Oracom there’s no harm done. Drop an IPOD and it’s like dropping a very expensive juke box hard drive.

CON’s:
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There is no “key guard” in operation so if you accidentally turn it on in your pocket or clip another button its going to have an effect on it unless its off.

Mine is only 128 MB’s but you can now get 256 MB versions, so this isn’t really a disadvantage now.

Poor standard earphones, but hey at least you get some.

CONCLUSION:
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As the market changes and updates there are larger sized memory on these players, thus the price of this has also gone down from £80 to £69.99 on www.amazon.co.uk where I originally purchased mine. The normal seems to be the larger 256 MB size now, which is annoying but at the time I purchased it the upgrade was just too much.

If this player was stolen I would definitely go for the same make again with out much of a second though, however I would get the 256 MB version.

Check this beast of a player out! You won’t be disappointed for a first venture into the MP3 world.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009MGDL/qid=1095350354/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/026-9140998-0182026

Ps If you are looking for MP3 players you might wanna check this one out :
http://www.ciao.co.uk/Frontier_Labs_NEX_iA__Review_5426180

This looks pretty good If you are looking for something more functional, but less portable.

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P.s. To the question posed on how WMA is better than MP3, I would say that on very low bit rate allocation it performs better in over all audio quality but thats it.