Home > Consumer Reviews > BUSlink MP3-BD256 - Digital player / radio - flash 256 MB - MP3

I recently bought one of these mp3 players and have enjoyed it. The 256mb size holds enough music to fill all the boring spots in school, with enough space left over to transfer a few files. The sound quality out of this thing is great. While it doesn't have a random button, it does play songs in order of insertion so grouping by sound works.
The voice recorder works great, but only records at 64k quality, compared to the mp3s at minimum 128k quality. Also, while it is enough mic range to record little notes to yourself, it can not record lectures done by teachers.
My only real gripe with this product is the trouble I have had in making it transfer files in Mac OS 9.1. Every time I try, the whole computer hangs on the copying message. Other than that, it is a handy little thing to have.

This mp3 player sucks! Two weeks after I bought it the hardware broke and is unable to be fixed.The buslink support is non exsitent. So if it breaks there is nothing you can do. Stick to Sony, Phillips or Rio thoes are ligit.

I had intended to purchase the iPod until I saw the price and also read several reviews that left me doubting whether that was the right player for me. This is my first MP3 player - I wanted something small I could take to the gym. My biggest concern was NOT that it hold hour after hour of music because I knew I could delete files and replace as I wanted. After reading the reviews on this player I decided to go for it. I'm not disappointed. I'm running Windows XP and the device was recognized immediately - all necessary drivers were automatically installed. Within 5 minutes I had transferred 20 MP3's into the unit and was playing with the various functions. Nice size - 256MB which is more than enough for me :) I'm glad I didn't spend the money on the iPod....this one suits me just fine. The ear buds actually stay in my ears, although I still find them annoying and will probably invest in a small set of headphones to replace them.

The first day I started using my Buslink MP3 player, it served me wonderfully. Despite the shoddy quality of its construction, the sound quality was fine, all of the buttons and functions worked, and changing the playlist by simply dragging and dropping files from my iBook could not have been any simpler. What a great value, I thought.

DAY TWO ROLLS AROUND. . .

The problems that showed up on this player are unbelievable! Problems first arose when the player would jump to different songs in the middle of playing a song. It then began to freeze up whenever I tried to play a song, and at that point the only way to turn the player off was by removing the batteries. I thought that perhaps by emptying all of the data from the player and starting anew, the player's problems would be resolved. When I added the new songs to the player, the player's screen flashed that no songs were on it. The player then began to freeze when more songs were added to it from my computer. To add insult to injury, the player would then cause my computer to freeze up.

What was initially a "good deal" ended up as a waste of money and a great deal of frustration. I highly recommend shoppers look to Creative, Samsung, Apple, or any other reputable brand for their MP3 player.

As most other reviews have stated, the price of this unit is what sets its appeal. While there are smaller units on the market, this one is easily small enough and can hold more than enough songs/data. I use it everyday as an mp3 player and also as a thumbdrive. You can go ahead and read all the other reviews for the pros of this product, but what I want to discuss are a few cons that have yet to be mentioned in any other review. My main complaint about the player is that it has no rewind or fast forward capabilities what-so-ever. Maybe this isn't a big deal to you, but I personally like going through songs at my own pace. This is especially true for songs like Art of Life by X Japan; it is a 29 minuite long song and sometimes I would just like to hear a certain movement of the piece without having to sit through 13 minuits to get there.

The other complaint I have has to do with how you place music on the player. The first time I put songs on it, everything was fine and it worked like a charm. Then i started messing with it and seeing if i could organize my songs into seperate folders and access them on the player that way (since it doesn't support playlists to my knowlage) and this also worked great. You could just start listening to songs and the player will automatically start playing songs from the next folder after the preceding one has finished playing. Now, since this had worked so well, I decided that i would place ALL my songs into folders for organizational purposes. Bad idea. If you do this the player will come up with a no music found error msg on the screen. Basically, this is how it works. In order for the player to play any mp3s (in or out of folders), the FIRST file copied to the player MUST be an MP3 and MUST not be in a folder. I use a 30 second song as my first song just so I can get everything else to work properly. Also, if you do not use the navigation feature, the player will play the songs in this order: Songs not in folders, songs in first folder, songs in second folder, etc. Keep in mind that when selecting which folders or songs to play, the player will automatically play them in the order that they were copied onto the player.

say you were given this senario:

you place song A, B, and C on the player in that order. That will be the order it is played back.

so if you place them as C, B, A that is the order they will be played in. now, if you did A, B(in folder), C(in folder), you will get the same A, B, C order as before.

If you place A, B(in folder), C, you would think you would still get the A, B, C order, but in reality you get A, C, B because the B was in the folder and C wasn't, even though it was added after B.

Lastly, given this order A(in folder), B(in folder), C(in folder) nothing will play at all because the player must have the first file as a mp3 file to play any others.

Anyway, like I said this is a good player. Unfortunetly my necklace thing broke and sent my player tumbling to the ground while i was riding my bike, but it still works fine, which is somewhat amazing concidering the height of the fall causing decent vertical velocity on impact, and the fact that it was also traveling about 22 mph when it struck. I say if you don't mind the rewind/fast forward options being non-existant, then go for this player. just keep in mind the order you add songs to this so you arent surprised when you cant find the song you want!