COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

It's said among marketers that a happy customer will tell 3 people, while an unhappy customer will tell 23 people.

Well, I'm telling about a thousand people:

I broke down and got my first MP3 player last week. I got a Rave, just on a whim and it seemed to be more price efficient for a given amount of memory than an IPod and some of the other players out there.

Bottom line: It's crap.

Don't get me wrong: I love it when it works. And the onboard 5-band EQ means I can engineer it to sound good on my piece of crap car speakers. It's a quantum leap forward over a cd player. And it caused me to listen to and reappreciate tunes I hadn't heard in years - maybe because they were on records I had bought years ago and my ears were just not advanced enough to appreciate what was on them. But thanks to the shuffle feature, I got reacquainted with some gems I had missed before.

But the player conked out on me last night for no reason. It had been out of the box for less than a week. Just froze up mid-tune. Couldn't even turn it off to reboot it. All I could think of was letting it run out of battery power which would take 10 hours according to the sales literature (actually, it takes about 3, but I'm usually powering a cassette adapter rather than ear buds.)

Well, I got home and plugged the USB cable in to see if I could still view the files, and that woke it back up. So I brought it back to work and plugged in the earphones here in the office. It worked fine. For about a minute.

Then shut down again.

Reading the (mostly negative) reviews on Amazon, it's clear my experience isn't unique.

I also notice the random shuffle isn't random at all, but clearly favors about a dozen tracks.

I might have been more charitable in reviewing it, but there was another problem:

I bought the player in part for its voice recorder functionality - it seemed like a convenient way to pick up tunes from other musicians. But there was nothing in the instructions that covered how to use it. So I emailed customer service last friday.

Since then, I figured out how to use the voice recorder (the mic sucks, but it works for its intended purpose), but it's been nearly a week and I have not heard a peep of a response from them.

Soooo tonight, I'm going to see if I can salvage the tracks I've got on the player, then return it for a product that works. I know I want an on board 5 band EQ! The microphone is nice but not a must have. I already have a small Fostex 4 track I'm too lazy to use anyway.

I'm just glad I hadn't bought it for anyone else already.

Sorry, Rave! But next time, don't f***ing ignore your customers!

Meanwhile, any suggestions for a replacement player?

Jason