Membranophonist’s Ramblings

George Walsh has written a review of his experience with the 20 GB Dell Digital Jukebox.

“In my case, installation for the 20 GB DJ can be summed up in one word: painful.”

Someone with technical knowledge and experience describing an installation experience as “painful” does not generally bode well for average consumers.

“You also can’t transfer files from the Jukebox to another computer that doesn’t have the Dell File manager software installed, so it has limited capabilities. If you have a desktop machine and a laptop machine that both have the software installed, great. If you want to bring files to school or work or and copy them to a machine that doesn’t have the Dell software installed, you’re screwed.”

Even normal data files? I can understand not allowing the music files to be copied, but having to have Dell’s software installed just to copy files? Crappy. My iPod was very useful when I needed to transport project files between my iMac and one of Berklee’s MIDI workstations, which prevented non-admin users from installing any software.

“While the recording function on the Digital Jukebox worked fine for dictating or recording conversations, there seems to be no way to move those recordings to your computer (even if it’s to email them to a student or co-worker who may have missed a class or meeting). It also doesn’t have any bit rate setting for the recorder, so until you’re done recording, you don’t know how much disc space you’ve used up and aren’t given the option of going for lower quality and higher capacity (or vice versa, for example, for example, if you’re recording live music).”

So you can record, but there is no way to tell how long you can record for, and once you are done recording, there is no way to get the recording off the DJ. Super.

“(That said,) do you really want to drop between $250 and $300 to beta test a company’s product and get online in their forums to tell them what they should do to improve it? I wouldn’t, but you might.”