Digital Trends

Linksys WMA11B April 16th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Browsing and Listening to Music

The ‘Music' menu gives you three sub-menus: ‘Choose Music', ‘Now Playing', and ‘Options'. In the ‘Choose Music' menu you can select all music, or select by artists, playlists, genres or folders. The ‘Now Playing' screen shows the current selection that is playing and the ‘Options' screen allows you to shuffle or repeat playlists.

Navigating with the remote takes some getting used to because it is not as intuitive as it may seem at first. For instance, the remote features a directional keypad with a left, right, up and down button. The product manual says that these arrow keys and the select button in the middle of them are to “move through menus, songs or pictures.” However, they don't react as you may expect. When navigating, there is a right arrow icon on each item you can select, so we repeatedly found ourselves hitting the right arrow to select these items. The ‘Select' button is used for selecting items, but of course it does not have a right arrow icon on it. You also can't go back to a previous menu with the left arrow key - that function is accomplished by hitting the ‘Previous' button. So even though the manual says that these keys are for navigating through the folders, you really have to use a combination of the arrow keys, select button and the next and back buttons.

Navigation also lacks the ability to fast forward or rewind through digital audio tracks — again a basic function of many traditional digital media players and MP3 software.

Once you get the music to play, there are still navigation issues. One annoyance we found was the fact that no matter how you select the music you want to play, the song you pick first always will show as track 1 in the list. For instance, if you select track number 5 to play, the on-screen display will call that track one. Since most ID3 tags have track numbers in them, and people used to playing CDs are familiar with track numbers actually meaning something, this takes some getting used to.

On the subject of ID3 tags, the WMA11B uses them, but not as well as we think it should. It knows genre, artist and album names, but there is no option to see the full track information on the screen. When playing a song, the display only shows title, artist and album. One important feature that was left out was time — time remaining in a track, duration of the track and how much time has elapsed. This is one of the most basic display aspects of CD and DVD players and almost every MP3 or digital audio player we have ever seen — yet it is not shown anywhere on the Media Adapter display.

The display also suffers from the inability to show enough characters. If the Title, Artist or Album name is more than 20 characters long, you won't be able to see the end of it. After 20 characters you see three dots, usually something that lets you know there is more to be seen, but you can not scroll to the right to read the rest. Other players will scroll the text left and right to allow you to view the whole name but that is not an option here.

Two of the WMA11B display screens. Notice how the song title gets cut off

The issue of remote control latency is most noticeable when playing music, as clicking to go the next or a previous track while playing a song takes way too long.