M-Cody M-20 2GB
Page 5
Installing Software
The M-20 is a USB Mass Storage class device. This means it does not need any drivers, unless you are using Windows 98, of course. Still, the M-20 comes with an installation CD.
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"LDB Manager" is Median's Lyrics database software. What it does is that the software will connect to the LDB service and retrieve lyrics for your songs. What is different about the LDB Manager is that lyrics are formatted and synchronised to the different M-Cody players. Thus lyrics for the M-20 will scroll automatically according to the song. Neat feature. More on that later.
Installation of the LDB Manager is standard InstallShield stuff. Nothing fancy.
The "Online Update" is a link to the M-Cody website to download the Online Updater setup program.
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After downloading and running the file, there is still more downloading to be done.
Finally, an InstallShield setup wizard for "Median M-cody Multi Player".
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We faced a serious issue with the way the CD was designed. Instead of using an executable autoplay program, they used HTML. Even worse, the HTML page would popup a new, resized window for the actualy screen. Considering that the majority of users would have some form of popup-blocker installed, and even Windows XP Service Pack 2 has popup-blocking, the CD would not be able to work properly.
Transferring Files
Because the M-20 is a USB Mass Storage class device, transferring files to and from the M-20 is just a matter of copying files as you would with a removable flash drive or your hard disks. The special folders on the player are used to store the recordings. You are free to organise your music whichever way you like.
We also tried using Windows Media Player 11 to transfer music, and it worked fine. The advantage of this is that you can set WMP to recode the music files to a lower bitrate, say 64kbps or 128kbps WMA, to maximise the number of songs you can store.
Software
The LDB Manager is an interesting software, and we had high hopes from it. An Explorer-tree is on the left of the program, where you use it to browse to your music files. Then, right-click on the music file and click "Search...".
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The search screen appears. Fill in the "Singer" and "Title" and click "Search". In this example, we were searching for Christina Aguilera's Hurt from her recent album, Back To Basics.
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Oops.
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We tried again with an older song, and was successful. If there are multiple results, select the correct lyric, then click "Marking", which would save the lyrics.
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When a song with lyrics "marked" is played on the M-20, the normal playback screen is replaced by the lyrics (if lyrics has been set to display in the Settings menu). And yes, the lyrics scroll in time with the music. Neat feature, if you like to sing along with your songs.