Digital Home Thoughts: Groove to the Music: Olympus m:robe MR-100 Reviewed

Syncing/Managing Your Music
To get songs onto your MR-100, you must use the included m:trip software. We tested version 1.05 of the software and found it to be quite buggy. We've used Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes to transfer songs to other digital audio players. m:trip looks like a nice program but it is not as intuitive as other media software. To load your existing WMA and MP3 files into m:trip, you can drag them into the app or import them. When importing, you can either copy or link to the original files. Since we use other media software, we just linked our songs. The m:trip software can also rip CDs for you.


Figure 4: m:trip software. Click for a larger version (147 KB).

The m:trip software installs a service, a "launcher" application that runs in the system tray, as well as the m:trip software itself. That seems like overkill to us. When you connect the MR-100, you can have it load up m:trip automatically. Since this is the only way to sync songs, that's what we did. We found that m:trip did not respect the settings from Windows Media Player. We have WMP set to rip CDs on insert, with m:trip installed, it took some playing around with settings to get this to work the way it had in the past.

The m:trip software allows you to organize your songs. By default, all songs added to m:trip are set to sync with your m:robe. If you don't want songs to sync, you can uncheck them. This makes it a bit difficult to manage your music. It works but it is a bit kludgy. iTunes works the same way but the iTunes interface is easier to use.


Figure 5: Advanced searching in m:trip. Click for a larger version (150 KB).

With m:trip, you can organize music, pictures, and mixes. The pictures and mixes are really meant for the m:robe MR-500i, so we won't go into them here.

m:trip lets you sort your songs by any field that you want. Unfortunately, the sorting is bizarre. Currently, we have about 1,100 tracks in the software. If we sort by Album, the first on the list is "MTV Unplugged" followed by "Born on a Pirate Ship". Huh? Clicking on Album again sorts by Album descending. Now, "Uh-Oh" is listed first followed by "Cry, Cry, Cry". Again, something is amiss. Clicking it again, we see "Fruitcakes" on the top. The MR-100 we reviewed came with version 1.02 of m:trip. We also tested version 1.05 but did not see any noticeable improvements.


Figure 6: Playlists in m:trip.

You can also organize songs with playlists. They are easy to create and manage. When you sync, they transfer to the MR-100 as expected. You can also view songs by Year. You get a neat pictorial representation of your songs by year. Very neat. Of course sorting by year is kind of hard. When ripping songs, CDDB assigns years based on the album year, not the year of the original recordings. With things like soundtracks and "Best Of" collections, this can be a bit deceiving. This is not a problem with m:trip though. It just uses the data that's available.

Once you have your songs organized, you can sync to the MR-100. Just drop in the player and turn it on. Once you have m:trip loaded (manually or automatically), just click the icon for Sync. The sync process starts by transferring album listings. Then, it transfers the individual songs. You get progress bars while syncing, but not much feedback from them. No estimate time, just cryptic names of files transferring. If you look at the files on the MR-100 after they've been transferred, you'll see that they've been renamed. They are intact, just with different names.


Figure 7: Syncing to the MR-100.

m:trip will not prevent you from overloading the MR-100. If you try to sync more songs than the the device can hold, it gives you no warning before transfer. Also, m:trip does not display the capacity or free space on the MR-100. These are details that would be very helpful. We found that the synchronization with m:trip was not very accurate. In m:trip, all albums seem to organized correctly. Once synced to the MR-100, those album listings are incorrect. This makes it difficult to play a single album.

Another handy feature of the MR-100 is that it can be used as a portable hard drive. Just plug in the proprietary USB cable to your PC and the device shows up as a removable hard drive.