Home > Consumer Reviews > Pine Technology SM200C D'MUSIC Portable MP3-CD Player

I am very happy with the SM200C. The best feature of this unit was its user interface. I was able to see the name of the artist and title of each song and scrolled on the LCD for longer names.. I was also able to scan within each song so I can hear a certain part over again. I burned songs at between 96 kbps and 320 kbps and the SM200C recognized them all. Originally I bought this because it was CNet's recommended product, now I know why.

The only draw back to this unit was its inability for play lists, but I got around this by burning my Cd's with my playlist already set up.

I have an SM200C... I wanted it so that I could travel and listen to MP3's, in the car on the plane etc.. Without testing it out first, I went on a vacation and nearly jumped out of the car when it skipped MP3 CD's like a schoolgirl skipps rope!

It skipps, it's readout does not have a light so that you can see it in the dark, the readout reads from very little angles, and the sinleg button interface work poorly when looking at the road and trying to change songs. I found myself hitting stop and pause alot!

Also if you plan on listening to something longer than 10 minutes, don't! It plays the first 5 minutes, and then skipps past!

LOOKING FOR A GOOD MP3 CD PLAYER>>> Look elsewhere!

I bought a Philips Expanium and returned it for this player thinking that I wanted to see the song titles.

Reasons not to by this player:(1)This player is made very poorly. It feels like it is going to break. The paint on the buttons has already started to rub off and I barely use the device. (2) It skips worse than my Sony discman that is almost 10 years old. In the car you find yourself hearing snippets of the songs. It will even skip sitting on a table across the room (there was no dust on the CD). I'm not sure what's wrong with the player but sometimes it is simply unable to play an MP3 for no good reason (3) The headphone jack is finicky. You'll find yourself listening to mono for a while and realize that you have to push the headphone plug into the jack again. (4) Battery life is exceptionally bad. I'm lucky to get 3 hours out of the player. That's not enough to last me one day while I'm at work. Even though it comes with a rechargable battery pack, the battery gauge is still calibrated for alkalines so it looks like you have half of the battery life remaining right after a charge. (5) The ID-3 take support is pointless. If you haven't painstakenly labeled each one of your songs then you'll end up listening to "Unknown Tag" all day. It does NOT default to the file name if there is no ID-3 tag. Get the Rio Volt. Even though it has that annoying dancer at the bottom of the LCD screen, it's worlds better than this device.

Don't buy this unit at any price. I bought it a long time ago because it was the only one on the market at the time, and I liked the idea of playing MP3 CD-RWs. You can read other reviews and see the same complaints, but here are my chief complaints:
1. It skips horribly at the slightest provocation, anti-shock or not. This problem alone made me throw it out after I got my Sony, rather than subject someone else to this frustration.
2. Battery life (rechargable NiMH) is 2-3 hours.
3. It displays "Unknown tag" if the file has no ID3 tag. It could display the file name instead.
4. The supplied AC adapter often refuses to work for no reason.
5. The supplied earphones are horrible.
6. It's difficult to navigate through tracks. It plays files in directories but doesn't allow you to navigate directories. Everything is treated as being in one big directory.
7. Hitting "Next" while in shuffle mode actually goes to the next file sequentially, rather than picking a track randomly.
8. The user's manual is a useless short pdf.

There are better players on the market (i.e. every other player). Buy one of those. SERIOUSLY!

Pine just announced that any day they will be releasing the SM200C "Plus." But for those of us that need our MP3 CD fix now, the non-"Plus"ed SM200C is an acceptable alternative.

The SM200C is a great unit, and if you take my word and the word of top MP3 web sites, it's probably the best MP3 CD player anywhere. Whether it's sound quality or the ability to adapt to the many variations of the MP3 standard, Pine really took their time to get the most important aspects of the player right. (REALLY took their time! I first saw the prototype for this player at 1998 Comdex.)

The SM200C will play every MP3 that I throw at it, including VBR and CBR down to 8 BPS (The manual says it won't go below 32 BPS). It also handles multisession discs and ID3 tags. Unfortunately, there seem to be some discrepancies in the ID3 standard and the flavor that the SM200C recognizes only displays the song title whenever I put in any of the CDs that I have. The player comes bundled with MusicMatch. I stopped using MusicMatch because its ID3 format was incompatible with the Memorex player that I had before the SM200C. I have recently tried playing a MusicMatch CD in the SM200C and still only got the song title. Don't know what the trick is to seeing the Artist, but I wish I did. When taken with the fact that the songs aren't divided into directories, figuring out who's singing can be a real trick.

You may have asked, "so why ditch the Memorex when it has more features?" Simple, what good are features when the Memorex's sound is full of deafening pops and clicks. And that's not the half of it. The Memorex player is just a mess.

Not surprisingly, the features that are notably lacking in the SM200C are exactly what they've added to the SM200CPlus. A bigger skip buffer (The SM200C skips VERY easily), the ability to jump between directories (right now it plays all the songs as though they were in one big directory), and a suspend & resume feature.

Speaking of suspend & resume, the SM200C has the wonderful ability to switch between its included NiMH batteries and the AC power supply literally without missing a beat. Given how long it takes any MP3 CD player to wind up, this is a huge plus.

So in summary, this is definitely the best player you can buy from Amazon now. But if they change over to the SM200CPlus, JUMP! Especially if it's at this same price (MSRP for the Plus is over two hundred dollars). Also, be on the lookout for another new player from Pine called the 300T that will cost less and do more.

Trust me, once you finally get an MP3 CD player you'll kick yourself for waiting as long as you did. We'd all love it if some big name like Sony were to put out the definitive player (I'm holding my 5 star rating for when that day comes). But that's not likely to happen anytime soon given MP3's central role in facilitating piracy. So for now, we need to look for the best we can from the Pacific rim's "also-rans." I've read a ton of reviews and I haven't seen anything that touches Pine.

Amazon hasn't included very much basic information on the player here, and they don't like people to put URLs in their reviews, so I'll just say that it's Pine-DMusic Company. And let you figure it out from there....

Enjoy, I definitely am.