Music Gremlin MG-1000 Review

The Music Gremlin player connects to any WiFi connection to allow you to download and play music from a library of 2 million songs.

Summary

Since the days of the 45 rpm single, music has been about sharing. In the ’60s and ’70s, kids swapped records and made custom tapes. In the ’80s and ’90s it was CDs and recordable discs. The Internet Age turned MP3 tune-swapping into the primary source of music distribution for people of all ages—at the expense of the music industry which lost millions in revenue to illegal sharing.

Now with a fee-based–and legal–music download infrastructure firmly in place, Internet downloads are poised to become the medium for music distribution for the foreseeable future. New business models are popping up, expanding music distribution beyond the record store and giving fans new options for how they borrow, share and own music.

One of the more innovative ideas comes from MusicGremlin, a New York-based company whose Web-based download service uses Wi-Fi as the download channel rather than a PC. MusicGremlin players pack 802.11b Wi-Fi chips that tap into home networks, public hotspots and the T-Mobile service (the latter for a fee).

Each Gremlin player comes with the listings for around 2 million tracks, which are always available to users who opt for the $14.99/month subscription plan. You can also purchase tracks on an a la carte plan for 99 cents, competitive with other download services. The songs are encoded in WMA at 128kbps and protected by digital rights management. The player, which also plays MP3s, retails for $299.

Design and Features

The first thing I noticed pulling out a 4 x 2.4 x .76-inch MG1000 Gremlin from the box was the surprisingly light weight of the device. I was expecting something along the line of the video iPod, but this 8-gigabyte HDD player (versus 30 GB or more for the iPod) tips the scales at just 4 ounces. That makes it welcome in carry-on luggage when you’re also lugging along a PC, Treo, noise-cancellation headphones and an assortment of chargers.

I like the feel of the Gremlin too. The rubber lining around the sides has the feel of a smooth laminate book cover. You like holding it in your hand. The 2-inch backlit color LCD, with 220 x 160-pixel resolution, is plenty sharp enough to see the thumbnail album cover, track, album title, date, time of day, time of song, time remaining and other icons that indicate progress along the way (my photos would look good on it, too, and look for that option in the future). Menu pages top out at six lines of text which are easy to read and navigate.

The simple button layout is intuitive and uncluttered. A directional keypad on the front surrounds the enter button. Volume up and down, pause, and a track-advance toggle switch line up on the right side of the player and the power/lock toggle is on the left. The all-black design is farily appealing.

The Gremlin’s prime differentiator is its embedded Wi-Fi chipset. That enables the device to connect to the voluminous Gremlin library over a wireless home network, public Wi-Fi network or a T-Mobile HotSpot connection. Add the cost of a T-Mobile plan to the $15 MusicGremlin Direct monthly music plan, and the fully loaded Gremlin experience starts to get pretty pricey.

The 8-GB hard disk stores roughly 2,000 tracks. Having sapped the capacity of my 4-GB Nano a long time ago, I welcome the additional 4 gigs of storage in the Gremlin. I put it to good use, too, transferring a boatload of my WMA and MP3 files to the player over USB. The Gremlin supports Windows Media DRM files, and you can burn CDs with tracks you’ve purchased from the Gremlin library using Windows Media 10.

You can also download songs from other Gremlin players–legally–as long as that user is a subscriber, too. Although you can exchange MusicGremlin files with other MusicGremlin subscribers, you can’t share the files you download from your own PC library with another device.

To introduce you to new music, the service offers Gremlists, weekly collections of new music organized by genre. If you opt in, the service automatically downloads tunes to your device, replacing the previous week’s Gremlist. If you like a particular list, you can save it to the player. Saving is as easy as right-clicking on a track or list and adding it to a playlist.

The player ships with a battery charger, earphones, and a user guide. An FM tuner is built in to the device.

Image Courtesy of Music Gremlin

Setup and Use

Any product that hopes to compete in the iPod world has to be a no-brainer to operate. MusicGremlin got that part down. The player is a snap to set up and use. You register the device either from the website (easier) using the supplied USB cable or via the device itself which requires close proximity to a router. Menus are logical and confined to a single page.

Predictive logic keystroking shoots you through the alphabet in no time, which is essential when you’re sifting through millions of tracks. You jump to say, Supertramp, by tapping through the alphabet and selecting S and then U, P, E using the directional keypad. The list of artists narrows as you eliminate possibilities. (You’d be surprised how many groups have Super in the name.) You also search for new music by genre, album and track.

To select new music on the device, you need to be within reach of a network–and in my case, close reach. MusicGremlin supplied me with two players for review so I could test out the sharing features. One player could pull in my home network from across the house, and the other had to be much closer to my router. The latter couldn’t find the T-Mobile HotSpot connection in Starbucks either, while the other could. I tested the beaming and sharing features with the devices parked a cozy 2 feet from my home router, and they worked fine.

The MG player operates using 802.11b, not the faster 802.11g standard. MusicGremlin co-CEO Robert Khedouri says “g” wouldn’t extend the range of the device. All I know is that my 802.11g laptop could connect to my home network from my outside deck about 50 feet from my router, while the Gremlins couldn’t. Having your music come to you, rather than you having to go find music, is the primary appeal of the Gremlin concept, and if finding a network is challenging, that limits the appeal. I searched for networks on the residential upper West Side of Manhattan and came across only one network over an area of four blocks. And they were smart enough to secure the network so I couldn’t hop on.

The good news is network setup was astonishingly smooth. My fingers tremble with anxiety whenever it’s time to add on to my home network, but the MusicGremlin network setup process was painless and quick, simply requiring me to plug in my WEP security key and connect.

The MG-1000 Display and Menu

Once connected, you choose from the main menu to listen to the music stored on the device or get new music from the service. If you’re not connected to Wi-Fi, songs are added to a queue and download to the device when you next connect. You can also join the MusicGremlin community where you can download music from others and beam your tracks to them. You have the choice whether to open your library to all MG users, to share just with buddies you specify or not to share at all.

You can do a lot from the player as well, which I really like. You can create a playlist on the fly, using a mix of tunes you’ve ripped to the player and those you’ve downloaded from MusicGremlin or other users. Right click on a track you’ve selected and you have the choice to add it to a playlist, get track info, show the album cover, beam music or delete the song from the player. I love that. I can’t delete songs from the iPod without going through the PC.

When you beam a file to another user, the player asks if you’re sure you want to beam and asks recipients if they want to receive the tune. If you try to share an MP3 or WMA file from your own collection, you get a message saying that file can’t be shared. That should make the record companies happy.

A couple of times I doubled-ordered tunes by mistake, not having gotten reinforcement quickly enough that the order had been received. A MusicGremlin representative says in those cases subscribers would be reimbursed, or not charged, if they were on the a la carte plan.

Mysteriously, Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” appeared on my player, and I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t select it for download, nor did I have an option to accept the download, as I did when other Gremlin users sent me tunes. Fortunately I don’t find Billy Joel objectionable so it was fine. If it had been the Starland Vocal Band and “Afternoon Delight,” it would have been a different story.

Performance

The killer app for the Gremlin music player is also its Achilles’ heel. Wireless is flaky. I put the two players side by side and one could get a network signal from my home router and the other couldn’t. I’d try to download a song and lose a signal. I’d try again 5 seconds later and everything worked fine. I never did find a free network I could tap into in various locations in New York City, near the San Francisco convention center or in suburban New York.

When I did a network search in an apartment building in New York City, no networks showed up on the list of available networks, despite the location of a Starbucks 2/10 mile away and many apartments with Wi-Fi. In San Francisco, the player found my hotel’s Wi-Fi network but wasn’t able to tap in. The MusicGremlin can’t penetrate a splash page since those pages require a browser for entry.

I was able to beam songs from one device to the other sitting about 2 feet from my router, and that was fun. I went to the community mode and saw that a user I didn’t know was listening to the Indigo Girls. I tapped into her library and grabbed a few tunes. I can see how this product could really take off as the wireless part of the equation becomes more robust. It’s not there yet.

The FM radio was useless to me from my office about 30 miles from midtown Manhattan. My Tivoli PAL radio, by contrast, pulls in my favorite radios without a hitch.

The Gremlin’s sound quality was as good as any other MP3 player I’ve used, and volume goes up farther than I would ever set it. As a music player, I found it to be a worthy competitor to my iPod–simple to use with good sound quality. Each track download took about 30 seconds, which could add up if you’ve selected a bunch. You can either add songs from the device itself or from the website using a PC. If you select the latter, it will only download when you reconnect Gremlin to Wi-Fi, although Khedouri says you’ll be able to download via USB in the future.

Battery life is an issue because wireless gobbles up a lot of juice. You have to remember to turn off the Wi-Fi to conserve power. You generally can’t download songs or software updates with less than half a tank on the fuel gauge. The good news is, if a song doesn’t load fully, the player will pick up later where it left off. On a full charge, I made it from San Francisco to Newark with half a battery to spare. Khedouri says the company expects the battery to last the lifetime of the device, which in the tech world is probably 2-3 years before a user wants to upgrade. There’s no battery replacement plan in place.

Conclusion

I like this product a lot. Finally, an MP3 (and WMA) player has come along offering a compelling alternative to the iPod. It’s intuitive and easy to use, its playlist creation feature is strong (although I’d like to be able to add albums to a playlist, not just individual tracks) and its sharing functions are really fun.

But two issues can make it or break it. One, widespread Wi-Fi access needs to be available, and that’s not a given today. Two, those who would make most use of the sharing features–kids and young adults–are likely hard-pressed to pay the monthly fees for the MusicGremlin subscription ($15) and T-Mobile’s all-you-can-eat HotSpot service ($39 a month, or $29 with an annual contract). You can also pay $6 an hour or $10 for a day pass to T-Mobile HotSpot–more than most people will pony up just to swap music. If you already have a T-Mobile account for your laptop, you’re good to go.

As free Wi-Fi networks grow, so should the appeal of devices like MusicGremlin. I’m looking forward to a successor to this 8-GB model–one that will have 802.11n, which promises farther range, and a bigger hard drive. I love the MusicGremlin concept, but in my experience the network infrastructure isn’t quite there yet to support the service.

Pros:

• Attractive
• Large library of music to download
• Intuitive design and menu structure
• Bright and colorful display
• Can show album art etc.

Cons:

• Poor wireless signal
• Only supports 802.11b not 802.11g
• Requires a hefty price for the player plus a subscription fee