Creative Technology MuVo Muvo N200 (512 MB) MP3 Player

My own research had led me to believe that the MuVo N200 had a fantastic mixture of features in terms of both style, performance and versatility, combined with supreme compactness, and it has in fact turned out that this is exactly the case. I am expletive delighted with the MuVo N200!

Appearance and styling

At a whopping 34 grams (including a AAA battery that lasts 15 hours) and 1.3 x2.6 inches in size, the MuVo is not going to weigh you down. It has an LCD screen across which information scrolls at an easily readable rate, complete with backlight as required. The only controls are up and down volume, on/off, and a rocker switch for all menu-driving functions. I see they come in a variety of colors; mine is black. If the color of your gadget is important to you, Creative Labs has your needs covered. Myself, this seems on the same order of importance as the color of my thumb drive (exactly none at all.)

Having spent years of my teenage life humping around a Walkman with FM radio the size and weight of your foot, which was at the time state of the art, I presumed a gadget this small would be truly incapable of performing all the tasks ascribed to it. Actually, my first activity upon removing it from its box was to stare at the function list for a while, see the thing in the palm of my hand virtually weightless and say

"But that's impossible."

I said it more than once.

…..But au contraire!

But it should be impossible. The MUVO N200 is impossibly useful to me.

Means of carriage

I have three different ways that I carry the MuVo, depending on how I am using it. It passes all three tests.

Firstly, when I use it to listen to radio or music in bed, I just put it on the bedside table. It comes with one meter of earphone cable, and this is enough to turn over in your sleep and not strangle. Indeed, should it fall off the table onto the floor in such circumstances, you would still have enough cord to make it through the night without finding your MuVo hanged by the neck until dead in the morning, unless you have a particularly inquisitive hound sleeping at your side. My dogs snore but are not inquisitive, hence my need for the music in the first place.

Secondly I use the MuVo for music or radio when running and exercising. In this case I secure it to my arm with the enclosed armband. This is constructed of a stretchy material with best-quality Velcro as the securing length-adjuster. It wont come off, I assure you. The cord being the length it is, there is plenty of room for you to wrap a loop of headphone cord into the armband to relieve torque on the point of attachment to the gadget, invariably the first point of failure in portable music equipment in my long experience.

Lastly, I use the MuVo to dictate for myself, both my diary and my writing. In this case I secure it to my neckline clothing with the removable rubber belt clip. I have found for voice recording this is the optimal distance from my mouth, so I can keep it intimate and calm. If you should secure it to your waste, the built in condenser microphone would have trouble catching what I was saying at the kind of conversational tone I use to dictate. Perhaps you boom more than I do, but you can write about that in your review, right? The belt clip is extremely tight. Because it is made of rubber, it does not lend itself quite so well to dislodgement upon egress from a driving seat as some belt clips in my past have. It holds its place well. You should note that the belt clip, is, by necessity of the compactness of the device probably not going to cross the girth of your actual belt, and therefore the term belt clip is rather a misnomer, it wont form any kind of clip to the average belt

Major features

1. FM Radio

Frankly, it is astonishing anything this small could contain an FM radio. Who in our current technological climate really expects an FM radio from their super-compact portable digital music player? I didn't - but I was amazed to find there was one. It works very well, too, given the limitations of its size. I should explain to you the caveat that I live very rurally. This has two dimensions in terms of you evaluating the relevance of my review to your own circumstances. Firstly, I get relatively few stereo FM stations, so my sampling size is smaller than most peoples. Secondly though, I live surrounded by mountains on all sides. If you can pick up decent FM stereo on a MUVO here, you can do it almost anywhere. The earbuds and their cord are actually the FM signal receivers, and so FM signal is sometimes patchy when I am lying down and occluding one earpiece in bed, but other than that I get solid reception on all of my local stations.

I cannot tell you how long I have been waiting to own a gadget that could make digital recordings of radio broadcasts. I am a documentary person, and I have long been painfully aware that the only way to get first class documentary archives that were not going to be full of adverts was not to take them from the television, but to take them from the radio. The MuVo 512 MB will records nine hours straight FM stereo radio broadcast. More than enough for me. If you are a person who would use the MuVo to check out the latest music going around, this would be an easy way to sample the latest songs to your computer. In my teens I tuned into BBC Radio's weekly top 40 countdown, tape recorder at the ready to take down my favorites. I guess this is the digital equivalent device. There seems no limit to the number of individual recordings you can make, so knock yourself out.

There are spaces for 32 radio presets. The MuVo can perform a preset search, adding any and all stations that provide a sufficiently powerful signal. For me, this was many more presets than I had stations, but if you live somewhere with lots of stations, you can also add stations to the preset list manually.

2. MP3 Encoding

Another impossibly useful function of this device is MP3 encoding. In this function, one can attach an external audio output source, such as a stereo record player or tape player, and make MP3 files out of the audio from that source. To someone like me who has a vast collection of audio tapes from the dim and distant past, and a library of obscure LP's that I should like to be able to listen to on CD, this feature is an outstanding value. By means of this feature and my DVD burner, I have effectively immortalized many pieces of music and voice recordings of self and friends from the past for all time. The MuVo has a specialized audio input slot, and comes with it's own jack, the other end of which is a standard audio headphone jack, which plugs into any tape or record player you might be using as the source. It is one touch recording, and depending on the quality you have chosen for the recording (96 to 160kbps) up to 12 hours of audio can be encoded before the device is full.

If you are using this function to rip music from a CD or minidisk source, one can engage the synchronization feature, this will rip each track from the source album as a separate MP3 file. Neat, eh?

The quality of the voice recordings I make from prerecorded audio sources is perfect at 128 kbps, but there is a faint electrical warping audible occasionally at 96 kbps. When recording music, this is not detectable.

3. Voice recorder.

Again, it is a credit to this gadget that it would already be a remarkable product if it completely failed to feature anything more. In addition to the actual digital music playback it has, ostensibly the main reason most people might have to buy it, it also features a condenser microphone which permits voice recording. Over one hundred hours of voice recording can be made, in an unlimited number of separate files. The condenser mic is understandably very tiny, and so you would be able to record regular volume conversation with this device, but this is not an accessory for a budding spy, voices more distant than six feet are very hard to make out. As I mentioned earlier, I spend a lot of time dictating to myself for my writing projects, more so since I became the proud owner of two children under the age of two years. The MuVo is perfect for this.

4. Music playing

I have deliberately left this feature some way down my list, as in actual fact it is the thing I use my MuVo for the least, and I think any potential buyer should be fully aware of the versatility of the thing before necessarily focusing in on music playback.

Having said that, the MuVo does everything you need it to do in terms of music playback. The software that's supports the device includes Windows 98 thru Windows XP. The software included on the enclosed CD is as follows:

- An audio file converter for batch conversion of music files to a compatible format for the device.

- A basic and fairly standard Windows-based digital music player.

- A suite of programs termed the Organizer, which permits you to create play lists for your MuVo, place music in different folders for the MuVo, analyze tracks for volume and tempo management, and otherwise get music ready for how you will use it on your MuVo.

The device supports MP3 and WMA file types for music playback. You can use your MuVo to carry around other file types, thumb drive-stylee, but since the device does not plug directly into the USB port, you would also need to carry around the connecting cable. Infinitely losable. Get a thumb drive if you do this a lot, but you can most certainly do it if you don't want to pay out for very similar functionality twice.

There is an equalizer with four presets for different kinds of music, and you can of course adjust the equalizer manually, and set a custom balance. The music quality is excellent, and has the potential to go from a non-spouse-disturbing whisper to a volume sufficient for you to run alongside the railroad cars and still hear your tunes.

The device can carry some 30 hours of music. This is WAAAAAAYYYY beyond the amount of music I would listen to before getting back home for extended periods to refresh my list, so I can comfortably say the MUVO can store all the music I will ever need it to. But, then, I recall Bill Gates once reckoning 64K was all the memory anyone would ever need for anything.