SMARTMEDIA Problems
Written: Apr 07 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: cheap basic and small mp3 player
Cons: HUGE SMARTMEDIA (SMC) PROBLEMS
The Bottom Line: it depends on your needs but if you have high capacity smartmedia you plan on using in other devices beware.
|
|
|
| namsupak's Full Review: FID Irock 520 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
I like this camera it is great because unlike the other reviewers I had no problems with the software. I tried the included ircok software and it worked okay but thenI switched to the music match basic which is free. I have not had problems with it crashing or anything.
The player is wonderful because it allows one handed easy operation and the display even though it isnt backlit is very simple to use. The battery life is also very good considering its only a single AAA battery (about 8 hours).
The main problem I have with this camera is the format of the media. It says on the box that it is compatible with smartmedia (SMC). This is the reason I bought the camera because I thought I would be able to use the smartmedia with my mp3 player for working out and then for my camera (Fuji Finepix)when I wasn't using it in the irock. But when I took the card out of the player and tried to reformat it in the camera it gave me a card error. I also tried putting the card in a usb reader and reformat as a removable drive. But the card is not even recognized as being there. After some research I found out that the problem is with the way that the irock formats the media. I know that rios have problems with using this media because they dont even say they are smartmedia compatible, the Rio mp3 players only refer to memeory expansion through "memory cards". However the irock's manual actually refers to "smartmedia" cards. SO i bought the irock under the impresion that I would be able to use the smartmedia with my camera also. So I feel there is some false advertising on irock's part.
The actual problem is that the irock formats the card with some sort of low-level proprietary format that breaks the ssfdc formatting that is initally on the smartmedia card which the camera nees. And there is NO WAY to get that format back unless you are using a rio 300 and a utility you can download called riodiag. The rio diag utility and another utility for reformatting called "dreaming of brazil" requires that you have a rio 300 for it to reformat and recognize the card, but that's hard for people that bought the irock since they probably wouldnt have both players.
I have done some searching on irock site and they make no mention of this problem and I am waiting on tech support to get back to me. I will probably keep the player. But because of this problem I will need to buy a new card so you should factor that in when if you decide to buy this mp3 player and if you are planning on using the card for anything else. I found one site (http://www.digit-life.com/articles/smcrestore/) but I can not repeat the process he mentions since I am using a different brand of usb reader.
If anyone can help me I would appreciate an email at namsupak@yahoo.com.
Thanks
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
namsupak
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.