Digital Trends

MSI Megastick 1

April 11th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Setting up these players for use is very simple. Because they are seen by your computer as a hard drive, you can simply drag and drop the music or data files to the removable hard drive icon under “My Computer” in Windows. The only time you ever really need to install the included software is when you need to upgrade the firmware. MSI has a nifty little utility that will check your player and upgrade its software if it is ever needed. We recommend you do this before putting any data on the player to ensure that everything is up-to-date.

MSI packs a fold out quick-start guide which will give you basic setup information. However if you want more detailed instructions, there is a 51-page manual on the CD-ROM in Adobe Acrobat format. The instructions are good for the most part but they left out some very important details. We could not figure out which MP3 bit-rates this player is capable of reading from. The good part is that it worked when reading songs recorded between 48kbps and 192kbps which are the most commonly used bit-rates.

We had no trouble getting our test computer to recognize the MegaStick digital audio players and transferring music over to the player was a breeze. Upgrading the firmware was a little tricky because you have to hold the play/pause button while at the same time connecting it to your computer. You will most likely have to use the supplied USB cable when doing this so you do not have to reach around the back of your computer.

The Integrated FM tuner works great and this is because MSI chose to use the Philips tuner chip in their Megastick player. We had no problems seeking the local stations and storing them as presets. MSI gives you the option to store up to 10 memory presets for quick access. You can then decide to turn on or off the manual scanning when looking for the station you want.

Menu navigation is very easy to use, but different than players we have seen from the likes of iRiver and Digital Way (MPIO). You push down on the joystick to enter the menu system and then you have to choose “exit” to leave each sub-menu option. Other players we have seen assign a dedicated button such as the “record” button to use when backing out of the system. The Megastick is different in this regard but is basically just as easy to use. We were able to squeeze out little more than 7 hours of battery life using the single AAA battery the player comes with.