Freecom Beatman Flash-64 MP3/WMA Player

It really does fit in the palm of the hand.....and I've got small hands.

My slim line Sony Walkman cassette player had served me well for several years and it still sounded good, but the numerous times it (and me) had gone bouncing and sliding along the tarmac had taken their toll and it had started to become very unreliable. Time to go shopping for a new toy!

I've often thought about getting an mp3 player as the small size and lack of moving parts appeals to me, but until recently an adequate amount of flash memory has been very expensive and all the players I had seen suffered from being unnecessarily bulky and over-designed.....too much input from marketing departments and impractical stylists. I looked at minidisk players but the net capable ones that can be loaded with mp3s from a PC are still quite expensive and come with flaky software which is made even more awkward to use by copy protection systems. And anyway, I wanted to get away from those delicate mechanical moving parts. Then I saw a review of the Freecom Beatman Flash-64 mp3/wma player and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. http://www.freecom.com/

The LCD has to be small because of the size of the player, but the display is well designed and shows all necessary information. Backlight only stays on 3 seconds after a button press to conserve battery life.

The Beatman is as small, light and neat as can reasonably be expected, runs off a single AAA battery and comes with 64MB of built in memory which can be expanded up to a total of 192MB with a SmartMedia card. It seems to have been designed by engineers rather than stylists and as a result it's pleasingly minimalist in appearance and straightforward to use. A quick search found that ebuyer http://www.ebuyer.com/ were selling them for £80 and with a 128MB SmartMedia card (which just happened to be on offer) plus P&P the total came to slightly over £100. The player doesn't come with a case and ebuyer doesn't stock them so I got that separately from Dabs http://www.dabs.com/ for about £7.

When it arrived and I first listened to it I was disappointed by the sound quality which was nowhere near as good as my Walkman, but I soon realised this was down to the supplied Sennheiser earphones. I plugged in my Sony Fontopia phones and it sounded a lot clearer and louder with much stronger bass. The Sennheisers aren't bad, as cheap earphones go, but they really don't do justice to the Beatman and I would recommend spending another 20 quid on Fontopias if the budget will stretch.

Top.

I'm still not entirely happy with the sound but that's not so much a quality issue as a limitation of the graphic equaliser settings. When I'm skating I often listen to hip-hop and dance music and even good quality in-ear phones lose a fair amount of bass so it's important to be able to boost just the lower part of the sound spectrum. With my tape player I simply turned the bass up when I recorded the tapes, but with mp3s one has to uncompress them, adjust the sound, then recompress them which is fiddly and inevitably leads to a loss of quality. The Beatman does have 5 different graphic equaliser presets to choose from (Normal, Rock, Pop, Live and Classic) but none of them boost the bass alone and custom settings aren't supported.

Right side.

The Beatman connects to a Windows PC (not Macs I'm afraid) via a USB port but it's not recognised as a removable drive so music files have to be transferred using the supplied software. The software resembles Windows Explorer with two panes, the right hand one for the player's memory and the left one for the folders on the computer, files can simply be dragged across. It's easy to use but has some serious limitations. The player doesn't support play lists and unless you select the "random play" function it just plays the songs in the order in which they were loaded. If multiple files are loaded simultaneously they are copied in the same order they appear in the left hand window where they can't be rearranged other than by using the standard Windows file sorting options. The result is that if you want your songs to be played in a particular order you have to laboriously load them one file at a time which can take a while with 40 or more songs.

Left side. USB port is under the rubber cover.

Another problem is that there is limited storage space assigned to file names, so if you have too many long titles the player refuses to accept any more songs even though there's lots of free memory available, This can be a real pain particularly when using low bitrates which allow 80 or more songs to be stored. You have to rename your music files with shorter titles and start all over again. Apparently this is a limitation of the FAT16 file format used for SmartMedia cards rather than a Freecom bug, but it would help if the software told you why they won't load.

With the maximum 192 MB of memory the player can hold about 40 average length 128k bits/sec mp3s. The music file formats supported are mp3 at 32k - 320k bitrates and WMA at 64k - 128k bitrates. There is a built in microphone for sound recording although I don't know how well it works as I haven't tried it

Back

There is no remote but the controls on the player are well designed and the menu system is reasonably easy to navigate given the small size of the player and it's screen. A short press of the "On/Off/Play/Pause" button turns it on (unsurprisingly) and another short press pauses it. Short press again to resume or long press to turn off. Leave it paused for more than 4 minutes and it automatically turns itself off which is handy as it saves running the battery down inadvertently. The menu provides most of the normal options you would expect, but as mentioned earlier I would have liked a wider range of graphic equaliser presets or better still the option to load a custom profile. One minor oddity is that when playing songs in "random" order, pressing either the "previous" or "next" button chooses random tracks. It would have been better to have had the "previous" button still work normally in case you want to repeat the previous song, after all random is random (except that it's a shuffle really) and the "next" button on it's own gives you that.

Battery/card cover removed

Battery life is claimed to be up to 9 hours with an AAA alkaline. I can't confirm that claim as I use 600 mAh Ni-Mh rechargeables and I haven't actually timed how long they last, but I get quite a few hours of music from a full charge so the claimed life for alkalines is probably not far out. However it's almost certainly better to use rechargeables as some people have reported problems when using alkalines. See below.

The SmartMedia card has to be removed to change the battery.

I strongly recommend buying the case for the player. It has a decent amount of padding which provides good protection and it has a built in belt clip which allows one to attach it to the front of a waistband where the controls can be easily reached and it's least likely to be damaged in a fall.

The case is extra but it's well worth the cost.

Now we get to the dodgy bit.....if I'd read the support forum (you have to register to access it) on the Freecom site first I probably wouldn't have bought the player. So far mine has worked perfectly for the 2 months I've owned it, but a lot of people have had problems and Freecom's support seems practically non-existent, I couldn't find a single reply from a Freecom representative on their support forum and there's nothing in their FAQ about the work-arounds. Some people have managed to contact them by phone but others have just been redirected to the email support on the website where the chances of getting a reply seem to be low.

The reported problems include:

• Screeching sounds during playback
• Random deletion of songs on the player
• Distortion, missed tracks, skipping
• Player isn't recognised by the software
• Player suddenly stops working
• Overheating USB lead
• Memory card isn't recognised

Judging from the experiences of other customers many of these problems are caused by factors which can be worked around. There has been a batch of incorrectly wired USB leads which may have caused the overheating and is sometimes the reason for the player not being recognised. Some people have had no trouble getting a replacement lead which has cured the problem but others have been less fortunate. The player can be fussy about the encoding software used for creating mp3s so if you have trouble with a particular song try another version or a different encoder. When alkaline batteries are partly discharged their voltage drops noticeably even though they still have plenty of life left and the Beatman seems to be very sensitive to this. A number of people have said that using Ni-Mh rechargeables has solved their problems as the voltage stays high right to the end of the charge. USB incompatibilities can prevent the player or just the card from being recognised and updating your PC with the latest USB drivers might help. Failing that it's possible to use a SmartMedia card reader to load up with mp3 files instead of using Freecom's software. It won't work with all makes of card reader but Belkin readers have been recommended by several users and one has used a Jenoptik. Whether there are other problems with the player itself it's impossible to know so there's always the risk that whatever you do it won't work. A lot of people just gave up and swore they'd never buy another Freecom product.

To sum up:

This could have been the perfect mp3 player if only it had had a little more development time spent on it The overall design is just right with it's tiny dimensions, clean looks and straightforward controls and the sound quality is very good if one ditches the standard earphones for something better, but it has a few silly limitations and the support forum shows there are some serious problems that Freecom don't give a toss about. Freecom appears to be following the lead of many computer software suppliers by releasing an unfinished product full of bugs and then letting their customers provide the technical support for themselves. That's got to be a stupidly short term policy for a hardware supplier even if software suppliers manage to get away with it. So far my Beatman has worked well but I'd be very wary about buying any other Freecom product and I can't honestly recommend anyone else buy the Beatman unless they go into it with their eyes open and make sure they buy it from a retailer with a good returns policy in case there are problems.

Mick Brown

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