This a an awesome buy for < $10. Only problem is you have to take this device out every time you get off the car, otherwise the battery gets drained as it does not have a power off functionality.

It has shuffle, you have to hold down the play button I think to get this option.

I understand that since the FM transmitter is made outside the USA, they may have, uh, "neglected" to make sure that it conforms to US (read: low power) standard.

I have a similar one from DX and it sends the clearest FM-transmitter signal I've ever heard. Note that USA FM stations are only on odd decimal frequencies, e.g. 95.1, 95.3, but not 95.2! Most US FM radios won't tune the even frequencies, but if yours will, you're definitely a winner in terms of clear spots on the dial.

My 'remote' didn't appear to work until I checked the battery closely - there was a little clear plastic spacer tab that was keeping it from making contact while it was still in the package.

Haven't tried it with an SDHC card yet - maybe on the way in to work today. Will report back on mine.

It's a great solution to throw into the travel bag to take your tunes to rental cars too ... not that we do that much car renting these days, or traveling, but hey, at least it's available.

You should get a "light" on the display when it is on.

Is the car ignition key ON ?

Just got mine and so far so great.

I use mine via the line in function so idk how the USB or SD card portion works. The sound quality of the device is as expected. pretty clear. Device is easy to use and powered on as soon as it is plugged in. Will buy a USB card to play more media.

losedream said:when I was using my mp3 with it there was an annoying noise in the sound. But many people said the sound effect was good. i am confused. Maybe I should try with the usb.

You might have read this before...but, always turn the volume 'down' on the player and leave it like that, and increase the car audio volume. ( I'm guessing the 'annoying sound' you referred is that kind of a jarring noise that the player makes when the volume on the player is on the high side..) Good luck!

cohcoh said:this might sound silly... since it generates strong radio signals, would this thing harm your health?

I dont think it generates signals so strong that it will harm you in any way, but then its cheap and comes from china so there must be some way its potentially harmful... we just dont know how ... yet.

The tip of my plug fell off when I unplugged mine. What I would recommend is unscrewing the tip slightly and apply some super glue so that yours doesn't fall apart. Mine doesn't work now.

FWIW, mine lasted a week

Received mine two days ago. Pluged it to the car adapter and the unit flashed for 1 sec and died.
This thing is totally garbage. I opened the unit, the build quality is extremely poor, plus no service, price is not cheap either. Even it works at the first place, I really doubt how long it will last, one month? If you have extra $10 to spend, find something else.
I am done with DealExtreme. Burn me once, shame on you. I will not give you a second chance.

I ordered three of these several weeks ago. They've arrived and I've just recently had time to start playing with them much. In general it seems to work decently considering the price and my very modest expectations of its capabilities. I've used them with 2GB SD cards -- one holding only twenty or so tracks, and the other with around fifty tracks (so far). I've encoded them at 192kbit/s ABR (average bit rate), joint stereo, with ID3 tags, and they seem to work well with those settings.

Some tracks play much "louder" (on a consistent basis all through the track, not just moments of time) in reality than others. This is despite the fact that I *think* (I'll double check later) all the tracks probably did have the "replay gain" parameter set by the LAME encoder when they were transcoded, and that is supposed to normalize the playback volume somewhat according to the loudest part of the file being encoded so those are all more consistently loud across tracks during playback. Obviously a track with soft passages and short loud portions will play back mostly quiet with a loud part, but that's not what I'm referring to, I mean to say that overall some tracks seem pretty quiet during playback to the point where they're a little too quiet whereas others are fine and loud. Thus you should probably take some extra care to use audio 'compression' / 'companding' type options in your encoding for the MP3s and enable any extra volume leveling / normalization you can to help everything play back nicely loudly with these devices.

As others have said, it is best to turn down the MP3 player's volume a few counts less than its maximum because it distorts the audio a lot worse when it is near maximum volume versus when it is mid-high level or mid level playback volume. Turn UP the volume in the car's radio to compensate for the quiet playback from these units, but don't blow out your ears / speakers if you switch stations to a regular radio station before you turn the radio's volume control back down to more normal ranges.

I bought a super-talent 8GB USB stick to use sometimes with these players; I loaded it up with about 2000 or so tracks at 192kbit/s and plugged it into the MP3 player and it just froze and doesn't play at all via that USB stick. It detects the stick but something isn't working. Maybe it is in a funky flavor of disc format and reformatting the USB stick would help. Maybe 2000 is just too many tracks and it can't deal with it. Maybe the hundreds of folders / subfolders holding the tracks is too much for it. Maybe it just doesn't like this particular USB stick.

Someone else said the following warning on another forum (and I BELIEVE they were talking about this model of player though it is hard to say since there isn't consistent branding / model number usage with this product depending on who sells it).
They claimed that somewhere in the range of 500-580 tracks or so there's a limitation whereas the MP3 player starts to malfunction in terms of its capability to play / skip / seek / index into the tracks e.g. if you're using the remote to tell it to jump to track #600 or whatever it may not work right. That's a decent number of tracks for a MP3 player of this cost and limited selection capabilities for organizing the tracks (no playlist?). Certainly it'd be enough play time that you'd have to be on a pretty long trip to get repeats in linear play mode at 500 tracks. So it'd be a good match for a 2GB card if this limit does exist and create objectionable problems. It could well interfere with one's desire / ability to just copy ALL of one's music / audio over to a 4GB or 8GB storage medium and be able to have EVERYTHING if one has well over 500 tracks/files though.
I believe they also said something about excessively long folder names / large numbers of sub folders confusing the MP3 player and causing it not to work right. Putting everything in the root directory was common advice.
** I haven't personally confirmed the problems here on my units yet other than to observe that my 8GB USB stick with 2000 tracks and lots of sub folders and long file names didn't play at all for unknown reasons. There ARE various firmware revisions of these units, so maybe some of them are newer and don't have the same limitations even if some past ones did. I don't know.

I haven't found a way to do playlists for this; it'd be nice if it supported them. Maybe I'll play around and see if I can find some hidden feature by which they work.

Changing your radio's bass / treble / equalizer controls probably will help bring out the range of the audio with these devices too.

Some "clear frequencies" do work better than others i.e. have less interference / noise.

For people with "DOA" units, check the fuse to see if it is blown and that the tip of the unit (fuse holder tip) is screwed in tight. Also be sure your unit is making good contact with the power socket ... some things seem to have bad contact and fail to get power depending on the design of the device and the design of the car's socket..

Overall despite the limitations I'd say these are handy / nice units. If your car has a real "line in" or "mp3 player in" audio jack then of course plugging a portable MP3 player into that will probably give better results than using ANY FM modulator.
The problem with portable MP3 players for car use is lack of a way to play it through the car speakers unless you use a FM modularor or similar (expensive usually) as well as the lack of ability to power many of the MP3 players from the car while driving so you're not using the MP3 player's limited battery capacity; if it is possible at all, usually you need expensive / kludgy adaptors / cables / accessories to do it. Were these issues not problems then I'd say getting a "real" pocket / portable MP3 player would perform better than these units, however for the cost and the feature benefits, I think these do have a niche and satisfy a need for car audio. The next step up from these would probably be replacing your entire radio with one that has USB/MP3/bluetooth/analog line in or whatever inputs and can play MP3s by itself or via an external device. Expensive / difficult.