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“Mac User! So finding a player that is outside the iPod...”

Written on: 02/01/2007 by Flyfisher (11 reviews written)

Good Points
Tiny size and as of January 2007 a great price from PC World

Bad Points
None so far! But read the review for operating tweaks.

General Comments
Mac User! So finding a player that is outside the iPod range is a problem. There appears to be a host of cheap MP3 machines around until you look if they are Mac compatible. A friend had a Matsui 120MR as a christmas present and was showing us the various features and I noticed in the devices handbook that it was 'plug and play' with OSX! and it is.



PC World have them for sale at £24.99 so a quick flash with the plastic and we have one. Very short user manual, not always a good thing. In this case it is quite OK.



The device comes with a lot of pre loaded MP3 tracks which are interesting but will probably be deleted by most owners. Mine were, just to make space for my own tracks.



As advertised the machine is a pretty true 2GB device and I managed to get 100 tracks into about .94GB all as MP3 tracks. iTunes does not like to communicate with the device through a powered USB hub and it would not mount it and then when I did get it to mount it would not let me enact it. The solution was to connect through one of the keyboard sockets, no further problems.



iTunes will not let me backward engineer tracks from AAC files to MP3 although the help pages say that it will. To get MP3 files I have reset the iTunes preferences to upload CD's as MP3 files and then copied them to the Matsui 120MR. No problems and the sound quality through my Sony headphones or through our Marantz stack system is very good.



The Matsui 120MR also has a microphone built in to allow you to record as well as listen. I will add a further update when we have used it!

My overall view is that the Matsui 120MR is a very positive and cheap introduction to MP3 audio.