Labelled MSD Univadis - Probable chip designer SigmaTel

Manufacturer unknown, but China.

(Promotional items, The one I reviewed was badged by a German Pharmaceutical company MSD & labelled Univadis to promote their German language info service restricted to doctors).

Features

Plays MP3 music
Also works as `dictation machines' ie they record human voice to a .wav file. (.wav are about 10 times more space consuming than mp3)
Supports deep directories ie you can have contemporary/group_name/album_name/track_name.mp3
Runs on a single removable battery, either normal Zinc Carbon or rechargeable NiMh. Comes supplied with a normal Zinc Carbon battery.
I had suspected the player Might recharge batteries if left plugged in to USB, Reason:
- USB 5V 500mA is more than enough for a 1.5V small battery.
- CDROM that cam with it has a readme.txt starting: "This is the customized Windows host software for SigmaTel MSCN Audio Player. Please verify that all the text and graphics are acceptable and let us know immediately if any changes are required.
  This is a USBMSC host software implementation and will require USBMSC firmware (built using sdk 2.400 or later)"
- Wikipedia says: "Over 150 portable mp3 player models use the STMP35xx highly-integrated low cost audio System On a Chip (SOC) that requires no external RAM, voltage converters, battery chargers, headphone capacitors, Analog to Digital Converters, Digital to Analog Converters, or amplifiers, and over 100 million such portable audio player SOCs were sold from 2002-2006."
But it does not seem to recharge off either a powered USB hub, or laptop USB direct.However, no problem, removable battery (AAA) is same size as in my optical mouse & DEC-T phone both of which recharge, & also fits in a generic external charger (not included).
Names appear on file system (seen by computer) can be long (ie longer than DOS 8.3), & can be lower or upper case.
Names shown on player display are shown shortened.
Standard small jack is near mini key ring so compatible with hook of hang round neck ear cables
I don't know what the hold knob does, maybe for microphone recording.

Capacity nominally 512M on sticky label. Actually a bit less: (Not a lot by modern standards, For Comparison, at 2009.10.21, another similar size player in Tengelmann, was about 24 Euro).

fdisk da0
cylinders=118 heads=64 sectors/track=32 (2048 blks/cyl)
Media sector size is 2048
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 6 (0x06),(Primary 'big' DOS (>= 32MB))
    start 48, size 242256 (473 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
        end: cyl 630/ head 7/ sector 48
The data for partition 2 is: <UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is: <UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is: <UNUSED>

Block size 2K (unusual, normally sticks are 512 bytes). Unit I tested was. 242304 x 2K = 496238592 bytes,

File system from factory:

   1825 May 22  2007 ./HERO.lrc
4167053 May 22  2007 ./HERO.mp3
   1744 May 22  2007 ./PrettyBoy.lrc
6692864 May 22  2007 ./PrettyBoy.mp3
    471 Dec 27  2002 ./SETTINGS.DAT
   7770 Dec 27  2002 ./VOICE/V001.WAV

HERO.lrc:       ISO-8859 English text, with CRLF line terminators
HERO.mp3:       MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1, 128 kBits, 44.1 kHz, JntStereo
PrettyBoy.lrc:  ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators
PrettyBoy.mp3:  Audio file with ID3 version 23.0 tag, MP3 encoding
SETTINGS.DAT:   data
VOICE/V001.WAV: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, IMA ADPCM, mono 8000 Hz

SETTINGS.DAT    A binary file. Safe to delete as proven by me: 
        { Deleting, Un-mounting, Power On, Settings, Power
        off, Mounting, Observe A new settings file (different,
        probably on a different song number).
    ( Intriguingly both new & old have date of Dec 27  2002 ).
*.lrc       Lyrics in Ascii, to some standardised format.
VOICE/V001.WAV  Sample noise, tapping.

USB Connectivity to PC: Seems a lot more stable than my Clipman, Connection doesn't seem to keep coming & going (like Clipman, which could crash OS, (Unless its just I'm now more careful?))
Speed: 1,812,634 bytes/sec via a Belkin USB-2 Cardbus adapter (might have been a raw read ?).

Speed. Via a Belkin USB-2 Cardbus adapter, to a single large file on the file system: date ; testblock -v -n dummy ; date Will write then read. Block size 61440 (0xf000). 9 mins 28 sec = 348 sec, for 483,901,440 bytes = 1,390,521.4 bytes / sec = 11,124,171 bits/sec. That's 3 times faster than Clipman

Software Looks like a USB stick (except block size) so no special software needed. Runs fine with FreeBSD-7.2 Which is Free Software

Manual is not consistent with player.

Manual says its shows software version number, But it does not, instead it shows space used & remaining. Even if you remove SETTINGS.DAT & reboot, it still wont show revision number (which might have been nice, to get a clue what formats are supported, per Wikipedia article).
Manual says it lists Chinese as a language, as well as English & Spanish But player has no Chinese, but does also have German & French etc
Manual lists lots of frequencies to record at, But player only allows 8 KHz

See Also:

Pictures Out of Focus.

Review of MP3 (& WAV) player, USB Vendor 0x066f, Product 0x8000

Labelled MSD Univadis - Probable chip designer SigmaTel

http://berklix.com/~jhs/txt/univadis/

By Julian Stacey Sept. 2009.

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