Home > Consumer Reviews > Memorex MPD8081 Portable Mini-CD/CD-R/MP3 Pocket Player

This thing worked for 5 days after I bought it...stone age and not worth the money.

Pros: Plays music in a standard format on standard discs (no MTP or other proprietary systems to deal with.) Cheap.
Cons: TOO cheap. Old and outdated. Limited format support (no WMA for example.)

Oh wow! These things are still being sold? I bought one years ago when it was a brand new thing. Back then it was good because flash-based MP3 players used the MTP-style proprietary method of transfering files so they were a pain to work with (not to mention that back then 256MB of flash was "high end" and extremely expensive.) Today you can do a lot better and frankly I recommend against buying this. I'll write from memory what I remember (I gave it away a long time ago.)

First, it doesn't remember any settings. I can't remember where it left off, and it doesn't remember settings like shuffle. That means that every time you start it, unless you go through the 5 or so button presses it required to enable the correct shuffle mode, it would play your music in the same order.

To make things worse, the displays do seem to be made more cheaply or something. I too had one where the display simply stopped working after about a month or so. While with most MP3 players a broken display is hardly fatal (you need to hear a lot more than you need to see) the fact that it couldn't remember any settings or where you left off and that it required you to go through several button presses to enable basic options such as shuffle made it become all but completely unusable since I wasn't aware I needed to memorize the exact key presses to do such things. If you want to play something in order this is fine, but, unless you rotate your discs very often, going in order will get old very fast.

Also, I recently tried to help the person transfer an audiobook to the player. In an effort to make the files fit on a single disc, I elected to decrease quality somewhat. I used low bitrates, mono, and 22KHz audio. All I got out was silence though. Officially it supports sample rates from 8KHz to 48KHz, so I guess it just won't allow mono.

Finally, if I remember correctly, I would occasionally actually get skipping despite the skip protection. If I recall correctly, it was certain VBR files it would skip on. I think I had the impression that it was primarily caused by files that could hit numbers like 320Kbps bitrate and the maximum the player was perhaps made for was 256Kbps. I may be mistaken about that, but, unmistakably whatever the cause was, it had troubles with some VBR. Either way, my current modern MP3 player has no such troubles.

So, I give it two stars. It is functional, and will still work today -- and it's actually small enough to fit within a large pocket, so even still has some convenience factor compared to a full-sized mp3 cd player. Unfortunately, it lacks a lot of modern features and the main advantages -- the large amount of storage for such a small size at its price range -- no longer apply today with flash based players hitting 4+GB of storage and micro/mini harddrive players in the area of 4-80GB and costing less for the same amount of storage.

I managed to get one of these refurbished off Amazon, so hopefully the defective-LCD screen issue has ben resolved on this unit. It gets great battery life, plays mini CD-RWs flawlessly (even multi-session discs). I use Memorex brand "Pocket" CD-RWs. The 2 minutes of skip protection is more than enough to prevent interuptions in playing. The player is small enough to fit into most pockets, probably not tight jeans, though. The included headphones are decent. The on- screen-menu is a bit tricky to learn, but once you get used to it, it's pretty easy and quick to naviagte folders and songs. The only qualm I have is the lack of a backlight for the screen.

I've had one of these for a little under two years and when I had it I rarely used it. It holds so little music per mini-CD that I just kept burning the much cheaper full sized CDs. Now, I have a flash based player.

If you're really considering this. Don't. Look at one of the cheaper flash players. The mini-CDs only hold 212 (if I remember correctly) and you can get a Sandisk DAP 256 for around $50 now (Sept 05).

However, for a collector of odd gadgets and obsolete tech, sure, this is an interesting anomoly.

The lcd which is a very vital element in knowing what is being played for MP3 cds stopped working after a month. I was very disappointed as this was a gift for my dad.

The battery compartment lid is very tight and I think that is one of the reasons the lcd stopped working as some connection may have gotten loose inside because of the pressure needed to open the battery compartment.

The sound quality of the headphones is not good. Used a sony headphone instead and the sound was great. So no complaints about the sound quality here. If the LCD worked, this player would have been a good buy.

I bought a Philips Expanium 431 instead. Not only is it smaller than this player and the lcd works great too.