Looks, size, controls and connectors
Here the M8470 is, with an ordinary AA cell for scale. Its styling is of obvious iPod Mini inspiration, although the M8470 is slightly wider.
Its colours are unusual, one might even say aggressive, but I find them rather appealing. I'm not too keen on the iPod's highly praised minimalistic style, as I find that drab white
pretty depressing (and the Mini's other pasty colours aren't much better either). Style and colour aren't what I'd base the purchase of a player on, but it's
still nice if it doesn't look like it came out of a black and white movie. Plus, it makes you look original.
The backlight is bright enough and is orange. According to the Extreme technology site you can get a blue one too. According to GoDot, you can't. Even if you could, though, it'd clash a bit with the colour of the plastic.
The black casing is metallic and looks pretty tough; it'll probably take a while before scratches start to show.
The player is also slightly thicker than an iPod Mini (I think), but it's still quite comfortable to carry around in a pocket. If you find it
too large, you should stop trying to jam it in the back pocket of your hot shorts.
It is also very light. I used a precision laboratory instrument to gauge its weight at 80 grams.
Ahem.
In contrast, my Rio Karma weighs exactly twice that at 160 grams, and my old Creative Zen USB2.0 is somewhat of a brick at 255.
Awww, aren't they cute? :)
The Zen has tape on it because those pesky screws tend to unscrew and fall off on their own accord, and I haven't yet found
a place that'll sell me replacements. It also has two holes on the bottom because of a modification I made to its battery. When it didn't work out I
removed it, but forgot to close the holes with hot melt glue. Hmm, I should really do that.
Of course, both the Karma and the Zen are serious high capacity players. No MicroDrive silliness, here: the Karma has a 1.8" 20gb hard drive, and the Zen has a heavier, larger, but more easily
upgradable and cheaper 2.5" one (used to be 20gb, but I upgraded it to 40).
As hard drive technology keeps marching forward, we'll eventually have MicroDrives that will easily be able to hold 20gb. But it'll probably take some time,
and while we wait larger drives are the only way to go if you want serious capacity without paying incredibly exorbitant prices for
custom-built high capacity flash memory players.
(10/11/2006 update: we're getting there...)
Back to the GoDot, the main control is the four-way button in the middle. You use it to navigate the interface and to browse the music library. Keeping it
pressed in one direction will cause the player to gradually accelerate scrolling speed, so it's no big deal to scroll through long lists of artists.
You press the orange button in the middle to confirm a selection.
There are also two large buttons
in the lower right and lower left side of the player. The left one is play/pause, and it doubles as the on/off switch if you keep it pressed for 3 seconds or so
(you can also turn the player off by selecting to shut it down from the interface). The right one is the "menu" button. You press it during
menu navigation to go back.
These are all the controls of the M8470. Portable audio enthusiasts will, at this point, be wondering where the hold switch is. And
the answer is simple: there is no hold switch. You lock the keys by selecting the appropriate option in the interface. To enable the keys again you have to
press the menu button followed by the play button.
This is midly annoying, because to get to the lock option you have to navigate back (assuming you're at the song selection/playback menu) 4 or 5 times.
And you're going to want to do it, because it's very easy for the play/pause button to be pressed by something in a pocket, due to its large size. Pressing
the sides of the square button will also cause the player to skip a song forward or restart the current song.
Still, navigating back and selecting the lock keys option takes all of three or four seconds. I can live with that.
On top of the player you can see, from right to left, the headphone jack (which doubles as line-in input when in record mode), the miniUSB connector,
the DC input socket (which doesn't look standard, but is; that small vertical slot near the round hole has no practical purpose) and a small hole. If you've owned
a hard drive based mp3 player, you'll instantly recognize it as the reset hole, into which you poke a pin or paperclip to unhang the player when its brains get
confused. And (as you probably already know if you clicked the picture) you'd be wrong: it's a microphone, to be used for voice recording.
Should you need to reset the player you don't need any pin, paperclip or any other small pointy object that is so easy to find at home but so hard to find
when you're walking around town. You just press the two big buttons and the orange selector together, and the player instantly switches off.
This brings up the question of what would happen if the player were to become so confused as to no longer recognize any input. With no way of resetting
it, you'd probably have to wait for the battery to discharge. But I'm assuming the people at GoDot aren't idiots, and designed the interface
to prevent such a thing from happening. I'll let you know if I ever strike that problem.
Stop rambling and turn it on already!
Ok, ok. So I'll just press the on button for 3 seconds, and up comes the interface, right?
Wrong. What comes up is "DIGITAL JUKEBOX". Then "Application code loading", and the player spins up the disk and loads the firmware. Then it displays the "Music box" logo
I mentioned before, which after a second or so does a mystifyingly ugly animation of a guitar playing while "Loading..." flashes on the bottom left of the screen.
And then, finally, you get the interface.
This takes about 20 seconds, and happens every time you switch the player on.
All hard disk players load up in their memory buffer the firmware, information on what songs were queued and interface from their drive. For most (all?) players
this buffer isn't flash memory, that
keeps its content when power is switched off, but standard RAM. Which, being volatile, needs to be kept powered from the battery or it'll instantly lose
whatever information it's holding.
When you switch them off most players dump the buffer to disk, but also keep it in memory, so that the next time you turn them on they'll almost instantly
load up without even having to access the drive.
Lose power, reset them or wait long enough that the player goes from deep sleep mode to totally off in order to preserve
battery power (usually a few hours after being
shut down), and the next time you turn it on it'll have to reload its brains from the disk, which takes a good few seconds in most cases.
Some players have
a very fast firmware that can be loaded from the disk in the same amount of time other players take to load theirs from memory, so they don't bother with keeping the
buffer powered (my Karma does this, as it spins up the disk every time it's powered on but startup takes less than 5 seconds; the Zen doesn't).
The M8470, however, definitely doesn't have a very fast firmware, and yet doesn't have any memory-preserving function. Any buffer-modifying operation
you do on the player cause the disk to be spun up; apparently, the M8470 does everything but playback straight on the disk, bypassing the buffer altogether. So every time you switch it on, it slowly loads up from the MicroDrive, wasting time.
Ok, so 20 seconds isn't a very long time to wait, but think of how many times you'll start up the player in its life. Also, if you like (or have...) to pause your music
often, maybe for a few minutes at a time, you probably want to modify the idle timer setting so that the M8470 doesn't switch off by itself after the default 2 minutes.
It eats very little battery power just sitting there, paused and doing nothing, so this isn't a serious shortcoming. But it would still have been
nice if it preserved its memory for a few hours, like most of its competition.
I made a picture of the guitar (bass?) animation:
It looks like it was done in Microsoft Paint with the free-hand tool, doesn't it?
You'll be watching it for about 5 seconds every time the player starts. Feel free to curse GoDot for subjecting you to it.
Files and sorting conundrums
If you're expecting to find preloaded music on the player, you'll be disappointed. You get a nice, clean, empty disk you have to fill
yourself. I, personally, prefer it this way. When you do get preloaed songs it's either very old stuff that no longer requires you to pay
for it, or some chinese DDR-like pop you'll probably erase in disgust after hearing the
first song.
So, how do you get your music, whatever sources (some of which now hopefully becoming at least somewhat legal) it came from, on your player?
(11/10/2006 update: that idea got shot down a while ago; no legal p2p in france yet)
Well, you can do it in two ways.
On the M8470 you can sort music by database tags or by directory structure.
If you want to sort by directory structure, you create subdirectories in the player's "K2" folder (it gets recognized as a mass storage device), and stick
your files in there. Then you turn on your player, select the "explorer" menu and you can select your music and start it playing.
For some reason, however, the
player doesn't sort files appropriately in directory mode.
You get alphabetical (or numerical) order, but not starting from A (or 1). You can have an
artist's songs starting from (say) letter T down to Z, then you get A down to S. I have no idea why this happens, but I've found no way around it.
I renamed the files, retagged them (because I thought the tags might be interfering), removed the tags, reduced file names to only numbers. Nothing.
This isn't a terrible problem, as you will still be able to find your music, but it's still a quirk it'd be better if the player didn't have.
Also, if you keep your music named "Artist - Album - Track number - Song name", as I do, you'll only get the
first 16 characters in the file name, and you'll have to wait until the player starts (slowly) scrolling it to know what file you've selected.
Renaming the files to "track number - Song name" or just "Song name" (if the songs don't belong to an album) will help greatly, and it'll probably not matter to you as
you'll be placing them into subdirectories anyway.
If you want to sort your music by tags you'll need to upload them in a different way. To do this, you'll first have to install the AudioPhile program
you're given on the software CD.
You just select what files you want to transfer from the top window and click the "Send to player" button. It's that simple. You can also drag-n-drop from Explorer.
Thankfully, the player doesn't have any of those ridiculous protections that prevent you from downloading its music back to another computer. You don't even need
AudioPhile to do it; all the music you transfer to the player ends up, with its filenames intact, in the same "K2" folder the player uses for directory browsing, so you can just connect the player to another computer, grab the files in explorer and transfer them over.
AudioPhile isn't a masterpiece of programming, having crashed twice on me while I was uploading stuff to the player (thus
crashing the player's database, which then had to be rebuilt), but all in all it is small, fast, very straightforward and simple to use (unlike some).
I have found that uploading a few dozen files at a time, instead of just selecting everything and clicking the transfer button, helps AudioPhile keep
its act together.
Would this be acceptable for (say) iTunes? No. Is it acceptable for something that comes with a sub-�100 player, is very small and doesn't try to take over your
computer by wanting to be the only player for everything? Hell yes. A few dozen files take some time to transfer through USB2 anyway, so it's not like you need to
micromanage your transfers. Just check on the process every now and then and add more files when it's finished.
Keep in mind that MusicMatch jukebox has media sync capabilities and might be able to upload music to your player, possibly better than Audiophile. But the installation directory is 192
megabytes, and the program probably requires double that space on the hard drive. Using up almost 400 megs of space on my computer just so I can
upload stuff to my portable jukebox isn't my idea of efficiency, so I didn't install it. The installation directory of AudioPhile, by the way, is 3.6 megs.
Aaanyway, when the transfer finishes you click "ok" and AudioPhile closes. Then you disconnect your player, go into the "artists" menu, and say "what the hell?".
When I did it the first time, it was obvious the player was having a great deal of trouble with the tags. Most songs
were indexed under "unknown artist", and even for the few that were indexed right entering their submenu caused the player to display countless instances
of the same song or album.
I erased the player's contents, then thought about the problem. The files in question had been auto-tagged when they were converted by dbPowerAmp.
Maybe there was some sort of incompatibility. So I ran Tag & Rename, erased all the tags and remade
them from scratch using the "get tags from file name" option.
I reuploaded the music, and indeed the problem had almost gone away. Tracks that belonged
to an album were correctly indexed, with the correct order and all. However, those that didn't have anything in their "album" tag, while still in correct
alphabetical order (database browsing doesn't suffer from the alphabetical dysfunction of directory browsing), were listed under some album name that belonged to another artist.
I again used Tag & Rename, giving all those tracks the album tag "Various". That solved the problem. Now all the tracks were correctly
indexed in the player's database, and listening to music finally became possible.
To sum it up: files you want to listen to on the M8470 need to have their tags not created by dbPowerAmp, but Tag & Rename is fine. They also need to have
something in the album tag. Follow these guidelines and using the player will be painless.
Unexpected features
While playing around with AudioPhile I stumbled upon an unexpected, and very pleasant, surprise.
If you've read the specs printed on the back of the box, you have seen that the player is quoted to play mp3, wma and wma with DRM support. But AudioPhile
also allows you to search for ogg files. At first I thought it was just a feature in the program, but when I uploaded an ogg file the M8470 actually played it.
I was quite surprised. Players of all kinds that can play ogg are usually more expensive than their mp3-and-wma counterparts.
The iPod mini costs a lot more
than the M8470, yet it only supports mp3 and AAC (which is about as efficient as ogg, but is proprietary and with DRM support). Iriver and Cowon players are known for their support of Ogg Vorbis, and some (but not all) Samsung players can play them too.
They are all quite expensive, though. Expect to pay rather more than the price of the M8470 for a 512 megabyte flash-based Cowon iAudio U2, and iRiver's U10
costs even more (and isn't available with a MicroDrive yet). Samsung's ogg-enabled low-capacity players are all flash based too. IRiver also make the MicroDrive-based H10, which
I mentioned at the start of this review, but it doesn't support ogg (it probably will sometimes in the future, though, when iRiver release a firmware upgrade).
I can't actually find another MicroDrive player that supports ogg. They are either small capacity flash memory units, or large 20gb+ ones. There are likely to
be some, but not from the big brands, so finding info on them is hard.
There's this, but
it isn't technically just a mp3 player, it's bulky and probably much more expensive than the M8470. The RockBox
people have managed to get their ogg-enabled firmware to run on the iPod 4G, iPod Photo/Video and iPod Nano, but not yet on the iPod mini. When they do, it might become a choice. But it would still cost a lot more.
If there are other Ogg-enabled worthy opponents to the M8470, they almost certainly are on DAPreview or on Anything but iPod.
But you look for them. I lost patience after the third Google page.
(11/10/2006 update: there are now many players, microdrive or otherwise, that support Ogg. The format is slowly but steadily gaining ground.)
Of course, had I known beforehand that this player was the GoDot M8470 and not just the Extreme Technology Nameless Thing, I'd have known about Ogg
compatibility right off the bat.
There is, by the way, another feature that the box reports incorrectly: the equalizer. The box says the M8470 has settings for "Rock, Pop, Jazz, Classic, Normal, Custom".
The player, however, also has settings for Bass, Treble, Blues, Club, Live, Party, Soft, Ska, Disco, Techno, Reggae, Hall, Rap, Cult and Punk.
At this point I was half expecting it to also have a setting for African Ghanese hip-hop, but I guess it isn't that advanced.
That's certainly a whole lot of EQ settings. I, however, don't care about them. I've never seen the point of warping the music with an equalizer when it's
meant to sound in a certain way. If you disagree, though, the M8470 will make you happy.
There is another reason why one would want to use the equalizer, though, and that is to give more bass to tinny cheap earbuds. I use a pair of Sony MDR-EX71
canalphones that do a much better job at
reproducing bass, so I don't care about that either.
(11/10/2006 update: no longer; the Sony canalphones got stolen along with my Rio Karma. Since then I got a pair of Sennheiser CX300, which are
rather better than the MDR-EX71. I also got another Rio Karma.)
If you go into the EQ menu while a song's playing and scroll up or down, the player will change the music to suit the EQ setting as you go, so you can hear
how the music will sound before choosing a setting.
Extras
The M8470 also has a FM tuner and a record function. The FM tuner has absolutely nothing special about it. It's there. It tunes FM. You change the channels with
the square button, and if you keep it pressed it auto-seeks strong signals. That's pretty much all there is to say about it.
The record function, on the other hand, is pretty handy. It lets you record from the onboard microphone or from a line cable that you plug into the headphone
jack.
It records to mp3 (no awful quality wave, as seen in umpteen other players), and you can set the quality you want in the preferences (64, 96, 128, 160 or 192 kbps).
To record voice notes, lectures or other low fidelity audio, 64 is perfectly fine. With an empty disc, you could fit about 130 hours of voice in it.
This makes the M8470
suitable even if you don't care at all about playing music, but need a small device to record many days of audio at a time. And if the onboard mic
isn't enough for you, you can always get a better one, plug it in the headphone jack and use the line record option (it'd have to be a powered mic, though).
Speaking of which... let's say you're at a party, and you hear a song that you really love. But you don't have any immediate means to rip it or otherwise
copy it digitally. So you ask for a 3.5mm plug (a RCA lead coming from the stereo amplifier will do just fine), set the recording quality to 192, plug the cable
in and start the player recording.
If there isn't a 3.5mm jack available, you can always use the male-to-male one they give you with the player. It's very short, so you can easily carry it around if you
suspect you'll find yourself in a situation where you'll be wanting to record something.
Bear in mind, however, that the player doesn't have the processing power of a computer. It can't do any variable bit rate or joint stereo tricks and it can't optimize
the encoding process for quality.
So if you set it to record at 128kbps, you'll be rather disappointed to see that its encoded files will sound rather worse than 128kbps
encodings you do on a computer, even at constant bit rate. 192kbps, instead, gives the M8470 enough space that its inefficiency doesn't cause too much quality loss.
In other words, you could well copy a whole cd this way and keep listening to it without really noticing the compression (but you'll want to at least
rename the files; you can't do it in the player, and it saves files with a number as their filename and no tags.
Using it
The M8470's interface is simple.
This is the main menu. From left to right and from top to bottom, you have "Play my music", "FM Radio", "Record", "Preference", "Information", "Key lock" and "Power off".
The "Play my music" icon will bring you to the music menu, which I'll analyze in more detail shortly. The FM radio icon does just what you think.
The "Record" icon brings you to the recording menu, where you can choose whether to start recording from the microphone or from line-in.
"Preference", you'll be amazed to know, brings you to the options menu, where you can set stuff like the equalizer, standby timer, contrast, and time/date.
"Information" tells you the firmware and hardware versions, the size of the disk, how much space is still free, and how many songs are on the player. "Key lock"
activates the hold function, and "Power off" does exactly that.
This is the "Play my music" menu.
The first line is dedicated to browsing your music by database. You have icons for "Artists", "Albums", "Year" and "Genre".
Selecting one of them will get you to
its sub-menu, where you can select what you want to play.
The second line has icons for "Explorer", "Play lists", "List manager" and "Songs".
"Explorer" is what you use for browsing your music in directory structure mode. When you enter it, you get a list of all files and folders currently in
the "K2" directory of the disk. Clicking a directory will enter it (you can have a maximum of 5 nestled directories), while clicking a file will
start it playing.
"Play lists" allows you to choose a playlist to play, while "List manager" allows you to edit playlists, by adding or deleting single tracks.
"Songs" lets you see all songs that are on the device. You first select a letter, then you get all songs that start by that letter.
When you start the player on one song, be it in database or directory mode, it'll play it and then go to the next one in the album/directory, then the next and so on. When it gets to the bottom of the list it'll wrap around
and restart from the top, up to the song you selected first (provided it wasn't the first in the list). You can randomize the order, get it to repeat a
single track or the whole album, or have both random and repeat on at the same time.
If you want to listen to a few specific songs by different artists or albums, you're going to have to use the playlist editor.
You get a playlist for FM recordings (oh, did I mention the player can record from the radio? Well, it can), one for recorded songs, and four for general
use (you can create more, but only using AudioPhile when the player is connected). You can't add content to the FM and recorded songs playlists, only erase it. The player puts the files in there automatically when it creates them.
To add songs in a playlist you select one of the other four, select "add music", select the tag field (artists, albums, etc) you wish to search by, then select the song.
It gets appended to the playlist and up pops a message telling you how many songs are in it. If you select another song by
the same album, it'll get added seamlessly.
If, however, you go back to select another album or artist, the player spins up the drive and saves the new playlist before getting back to the previous menu.
This takes about two seconds every time it happens, and is slightly annoying. Yes, this does mean that heavy
playlist modification sessions will decrease battery life.
Once you're done adding the songs you want, you select the playlist you just edited in the "Play lists" menu, then the song you want to start from, and
the player starts doing its job.
Playlist editing is only available in tag database mode, though. If you organize your songs by directory structure, you won't be able to use playlists at all.
A word of warning: if you use Ogg Vorbis as your format, all those operations are better done with the player paused or stopped. That's because when it's playing music anything that requires
disk access turns to molasses.
Saving the playlist no longer takes the player 2 seconds, but 5 or 6. Selecting another song in directory structure mode can
take up to 10 seconds, during which the player will cheerfully keep playing the previous song (doing it in database mode is, instead, quick as usual, because it stops whatever's playing before changing track).
This, as confirmed by the official FAQ, only happens with Ogg Vorbis. The interface becomes a little sluggish
while playing mp3s too, but nowhere near as when playing Ogg.
The reason is that the M8470's processor is powerful enough to decode Ogg, but just barely.
When it has to load information from the drive while it's playing
it gets overtaxed and the player bogs down.
Most other hard drive or MicroDrive players use more powerful chips. IPods (even the Mini) or my Karma, for example, use a PortalPlayer chipset that consists of twin ARM7 CPUs running at a maximum of 90mhz. At that speed, one ARM7 is way more than enough
to decode Ogg or AAC, so the chipset is highly over-specced. But it does insure that whatever the player has to do, it won't lag.
I don't know what chip the GoDot unit has, but for its price and performance it's obviously something rather less powerful than a PortalPlayer.
The playing screen.
In the first line there is the play symbol, the repeat/random symbol (straight arrows means neither is on), the battery charge indicator, the clock and the volume.
The second line displays the song title, followed by artist, album and genre. If sorting by directory structure, it'll display the file name. Scrolling is slower than it should be, so it'll take a few seconds
to see the whole thing.
The third line tells you how long is the track and how much of it has already been played.
The fourth line has three icons for bookmarking, utilities and information.
The bookmarking sub-menu lets you select two points in a track and the player will repeat them. Useless, if you ask me. The utility sub-menu allows you to set
equalizer mode, play mode (random, repeat etc) and slow down playback speed. The information icon displays basic info about the current track (including
its full tag, so if you don't have the patience to wait for the player to scroll you can use that).
Audio quality
My hatred for DRM is absolute, for reasons you'll quickly understand if you do a Google search for "boycott drm". You'd never catch me with
DRM-infested files on my computer, therefore I can't tell you how this thing plays protected wma files. I'll just assume that, since
it says it does, it does.
MP3 playback is good. I haven't heard any weird noises (underwater effects, screeching) typical of poorly manufactured, very cheap players. If you're one of
those nuts audiophiles that say they can tell the difference between a 320kbps and a properly compressed VBR 192kbps-ish mp3 (and if you are I encourage you to try some blind testing), you'll probably have a different opinion. But if you're
an audiophile you probably won't want a microdrive player, because 320kbps mp3s take a lot of space, and 4 gigs isn't likely to satisfy you.
For sane ordinary people, most of whom consider 128kbps decent, 160kbps good and 192kbps excellent, the M8470's
quality will be just fine.
Ogg playback is decent, but it could be better. The quality of the music is fine, but the player has a tendency to intensify background hiss and add weird warbling effects to it.
You'll only notice it at the start of some slow songs, or in particularly quiet parts of them, and mostly in those that have a fairly high background hiss by themselves, but it's
there all right. When the music starts going, though, it'll drown out whatever hiss there might be.
This isn't a bitrate issue. I tried listening to higher bitrate files and it didn't change. The fault probably lies in the low processing power of the main chip;
I can visualize it sweating and panting as it decodes Ogg.
So: Metal, pop, rock, punk... ok. Slow, melodic, classical... well, it depends on your level of tolerance, but you'll probably want to stay with mp3 for
that.
Do the ogg files sound better in my Rio Karma? Yes. But the Karma is a powerful player with a serious interface, lots of processing power and excellent quality components. It cost me almost twice what was paid for
the GoDot, second hand. When you consider the price of the M8470 its ability to play ogg is remarkable in itself, and the small quality loss isn't a big deal.
WMA playback is as good as mp3, but if you don't have DRM protected music already there's very little reason to bother with WMA. It has a quality roughly comparable to properly compressed
mp3s of the same bitrate (although some think it's actually worse), but requires more power to decode.
Battery life
It's not brilliant. While the box says it should last 8 hours, and GoDot's site says 9 or 10, my estimates are closer to 5. 4, with lots of track changing and
playlist creation.
Now, most of my music is in Ogg, and as we've said Ogg requires significantly more power to decode than mp3. I haven't had time to test battery life with mp3 playback,
but I assume it should increase to 5 or 6 hours.
This is still a rather disappointing result, but there's a reason for that.
LiIon cells age even when not in use. Considering the player was sold at a significant discount, the shop was
probably getting rid of its backstock. When shops do that it means the items they're selling have probably stayed on the shelf for quite a while, possibly more than a year. And
their batteries have degraded.
I believe this is what has happened to this player, and that's why I'm not inclined to judge it too harshly for its mediocre battery life.
Besides, my girlfriend uses the player during bus trips, relatively short train trips or walks, so it'll still last long enough. She'll just have to remember to plug it in when she gets home.
If you manage to get a newer player, battery life will be closer to what's advertised.
Taking it apart
I wanted to take the player to bits to discover more about its internals (like what its main chip is).
When I slid the back plate off, though, there was a big warranty sticker preventing me to go any further.
Now, that warranty sticker isn't one of those special round ones that are shaped explicitly to break if tampered with, and with a hairdryer, small screwdriver
and careful hand it might be possible to remove it without damaging it. I wasn't about to risk doing that, however, because if I failed and broke the sticker my
girlfriend would force me to commit seppuku.
If you do manage to remove it without breaking it, or just say "the hell with it" and rip it off (whereupon warranty is still surprisingly likely
to cover you), you can access the drive (white) and LiIon cell (black). The cell's size and standard connector suggest that finding a replacement should be very easy. Just unplug it,
get your ass to the nearest electronic store, show it to the clerk and ask for an identical one. Or just measure its size and order online, though you might have to splice
the connector on the new cell if you do so. You'd probably end up with a more powerful battery, too.
The MicroDrive is a MagicStor (not a Hitachi, as suggested by the FAQ page) 4GB (real non-marketing capacity more like 3890MiB) CompactFlash type 2 unit. You could probably replace it for a larger one
with ease. Actual CompactFlash cards could also work, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. Some players control their MicroDrives through commands
that aren't compatible with flash cards.
11/10/2006 update: not long ago, battery life finally became too bad to stand. It was decided I'd replace the battery myself, because it'd be too
much hassle to bring the player back to the store where it was bought (roughly 1200km from where we are).
So I took off the warranty sticker. Just for kicks I tried to unstick it without breaking it, but it proved too hard for my limited patience, and
I ended up just ripping it off.
I saw what the main chip was, but I promptly forgot it. Heh heh. Sorry about that.
More interestingly, I tried to replace the microdrive with a 256MB CF card. The player would show as a removable device when connected
to the computer, and I had access to the card. I even managed to upload the firmware, but once it was disconnected the player didn't want
to start up.
It'd probably work with a larger size microdrive, but flash memory is a no-no.
Conclusions
For less than �100 (or slightly more, if you find a new one that's not on discount) you get 4 gigs of storage, Ogg support, line recording, a microphone and good (for mp3) or decent (for Ogg) audio
quality.
The little player also looks as it ought to survive for a while, as it's sturdily built and MicroDrives are quite tough. It's also probably easily upgradable.
The battery life could be a problem, but I remind you not to consider this player's lousy one as a significant representative for the model, because I'm quite sure its
cell degraded while it was sitting on the shelf.
So, if you don't mind a less than ideal (but still perfectly adequate) interface and spending some time to make sure your tags are properly set up, the M8470
is a very good choice. It'll probably leave serious audiophiles unimpressed, but it'll be good for just about everybody else, and in terms of pure bang-per-buck I doubt there's anything better than it.
If you find it, buy it.
