Sep
26
2005Don’t Treat Features as Bullet-Points
26
2005
This stupid, stupid device is a perfect example of what goes wrong when you treat a feature as a bullet point, instead of carefully figuring out how the feature will integrate into the device, and how people will actually use it.
The device in question is called the “RCA Rip & Go Digital Music Studio“. The big picture sounds pretty cool. It’s a bookshelf stereo system which has the ability to rip CD’s (sans PC) directly to an included MP3 player.
Problem number one. The included MP3 player has only a 128 MB capacity. This means it will hold about 30 songs. So, two albums-ish.
That’s pretty weak, but for the total overall price, I guess there’s at least some redeeming quality to the offering. The player is nice and tiny, so you can rip a CD to it while you’re heading out of the house and take your music along with you in a nice convenient size.
One problem - and here’s the huge head scratcher. The device “rips” in REAL TIME. If you have a 45 minute CD, it takes 45 minutes to rip. This is positively mind boggling. Freeware software available 5 YEARS AGO ripped CD’s faster than that. Not to mention… remember “High speed dubbing” on your dual-deck tape recorder?
Thankfully, it is actually possible to move the MP3’s to your computer after you’ve ripped them, so you can, I don’t know, do anything sensible with them. Oh, but the device doesn’t tag your tracks in any way (to be fair, that’s mighty hard to do without full Internet access), so get ready to keep renaming “track1″ and “track2″, etc.
But, if you had a computer, why in the world would you rip CD’s with this… thing in the first place?
With very, very few exceptions, the gulf between what consumer electronics producers make and what consumer electronics consumers actually want just continues to widen. And that’s just sad.