Digital Trends

MSI MEGA Player 515

May 26th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Setting up the Mega Player 515 for initial use is fairly easy. Windows XP will recognize the player as a removable hard drive. So once you attached the 515 to your computer using the included USB cable, all you have to do is drag and drop the music files on the player's icon under “My Computer”. The Mega Player 515 supports only USB 1.1 so transfer speeds are relatively slow. If you have the 128MB model this should not pose a serious problem, but if you have the 256MB or 512MB version, it could take quite a while to get your files moved on over. Using the USB 1.1 standard seems to be pretty normal for flash based players and we have yet to find a flash based player that uses the faster USB 2.0 or FireWire interfaces. If you want, you can opt to install MSI's MP3 Studio software which acts as an audio manager with features that allow you to rename songs and transfer songs between your computer and player. We preferred to just drag and drop the files onto the player rather than using the MSI software. Beginners with little audio editing experience may appreciate this software more. Once we transferred over our songs, we tested them out with a few of our own headphones.

The OLED display on the Mega Player 515 is truly amazing. Once you power the player up you are greeted by a splash screen followed by information about the first song you have loaded on the player. If you want to change or edit the startup graphics, MSI provides editing tools to make your own graphic or you can choose from 1 of 5 preloaded startup screens. Because OLED technology is still new and expensive, the screen on the Mega Player 515 is pretty small. The good thing is that the display is incredibly bright and sharp. We found it to be very easy to see both in daylight and low lighting situations. We are unsure as to whether OLED based displays are subject to burn-in like LCD displays but we noticed that MSI included a moving screen saver that kicks in after a little while. The display on the Mega Player 515 will show the name of the song, the format of the audio file, the order the song is filed on the player, song length, volume, equalizer settings, remaining battery life and the time of day. MSI has included what they call the “Time Clock” on the 515 which will sync with your computer when the player is plugged in. It's a pretty basic feature which should probably be standard on all MP3 players.

The Mega Player 515 comes with sub-standard headphones and a carrying case.

There are a few disappointments we found with the way the music is organized on the player. There is no true ID3 tag support and the song is just listed as the name you made when you created it. Songs cannot be organized by album, genre, or artist, and all the songs are bunched together in one large play list not allowing you to only play music in a specific folder even though they are placed in separate folders when the music is copied over.