Review: FIA : On3 Player - Digital Media Player and Library

Page 6: Music Player

The Music Player system uses the same selection/navigation system as the other modes, showing lists of audio files and folders. Once in a folder, you can choose a single file to play, or select from the Play All and Play Random commands near the top of the screen to play from the entire contents of the current folder. Again, having the Play button start Play All, rather than duplicating the Enter button to play the current file, would be a great improvement.

The On3 can handle an incredible set of audio formats, including MP3, WAV (PCM encoded), MPEG-1 Layer I/II, AAC (Apple’s default iTunes format, and the MPEG-4 audio format), Ogg Vorbis (the open-source MP3 replacement, which continues to grow in popularity), and lastly WMA. Since the number of users with non-MP3 files is growing (AAC for iTunes users, WMA for Windows Media Player users, and Ogg for Linux or other open-source-liking folks), such widespread support is a real plus for the On3 as a media player.

While the music is playing, a default ’slideshow’ of images fill the background, while the title of the song slowly shifts left and right at the bottom of the screen. Like in the Photo Viewer, while media is playing in the Music Player, the Prev/Next buttons can be used to navigate through all the music files in the current folder. Aside from Pause, Play, and Stop, most of the other special buttons don’t do anything inside the Music Player. Specifically, I think Fwd/Rew should do something, whether speeding up or jumping forward/back in playback position, especially given the growth in large audio files such as Audible audiobooks and thus the obvious need to ‘navigate’ such files. The Page Up/Down buttons control the master volume while music is playing, and the Mute button toggles complete muting of audio.

Also like the Photo Viewer, pressing the Setup button brings up an informational dialog. In the Music Player, it shows the title, elapsed time (and graphical relative-offset bar), file format, ‘playlist’ count (the number of files to play through), and the current repeat mode. Pressing the Repeat button will turn on/off Repeat All, which will continue playing music until you manually Stop it. If you’ve been paying attention, you could correctly assume that the Pause and Play buttons work as expected, the Page Up/Down buttons control the master volume, and the Setup button pops up a dialog with details on the current video file.

Using the Digital optical/toslink connection to start with, the On3 Audio Player function delivers simply awesome sound reproduction. Certainly, it all depends on the media being played, but some players have ‘washed out’ sound – there’s none of that with the On3, just pure, clean music. With a large drive for storage, and format support for some great sounding audio compression systems – AAC was chosen for MPEG-4 because of its better quality, at higher compression, versus other encodings – the On3 could be the only digital audio player you need for your home theater.

The main problem I ran into (if you can truly call it a problem) is that the Volume control seems overdriven – that is to say that at 3 or 4 out of 10, it matches up well with the volume setting for my stereo and home theater. Much above that, the audio signal becomes too loud, and at the upper end starts to have oversaturation issues. FIA could easily change the current 1-5 to be the entire 1-10 range or so, give the user more volume precision, and still have more than enough strength at the upper end. Word from FIA is that they are making subtle adjustments to the volume control to improve this situation.

Switching over to testing the Analog outputs, I ran into a minor issue. Something related to hard drive access was ‘bleeding through’ into the Analog stereo outputs. A light ‘click’ almost once per second, though if you adjust the On3 volume versus your Stereo volume, the average consumer isn’t likely to notice it at all – I just happen to have very sensitive ears! I only noticed it when I had the On3 volume really low, and my stereo turned up high – with better balancing, it was hard to notice. The engineering team at FIA hadn’t heard of such an issue, and will be looking over my unit. Again, since there is no audio issue on the optical outs, anyone connecting to a modern stereo receiver won’t even have the issue. Thus, this isn’t a huge problem, but one I felt needed detailing.

Given the extensive audio format support, you’d love the On3 to be you main music player – except that it has no ability to play anything but the contents of the folder you are within, the same thing missing from the Photo Viewer for big slideshows. Being able to Play a folder hierarchy would alleviate the complete lack of any sort of Playlist or other ‘managed’ music playing. Some portion of users might be happy just playing a particular folder of files, maybe dumping all of their music into one folder and random playing it all, but I think in this case the On3 will leave many users wanting more – and keep them playing their Playlists on their computers via iTunes, WMP, etc.

Some basic kind of playlist support is needed, whether using a PC playlist format or ‘building’ a playlist on the On3 itself. In addition, the approach that many portable MP3 players have taken is to keep a database of the ID3 tag information from all the music content on the drive – that would allows the user to quickly play songs by Album, Artist, or Genre, without any need for setting up playlists or navigating actual folders. We hope FIA is looking into possible solutions for transforming the On3 Music Player into a full-fledged digital music jukebox.