The Novasonic player actually includes something unusual. A Useful manual! 32 pages in all, with 1/2 devoted to Chinese, 1/2 to English, it's easy to understand, and explains the functions of the player adequately.

Creating CD's chocked full of MP3's to be played back on the Novasonic is a fairly straightforward affair. The unit will play back both CD-R, and CD-RW discs, As long as they are burnt at a maximum of 4X speed. The CD's also have to be created as standard single session data (ISO-9660) CD's. A tip, as the player will automatically juggle file order if necessary to minimize read head movement, is to make sure (at least in the case of Adaptec EZCD Creator) that "Preserve File Order" is selected (enabled by default anyway).  

The player can not handle multi session burns and doesn't support packet writing (Adaptec DirectCD is an example of a packet writing software package).   The unit can decode single bitrate MP3's up to 224kilobit, and can even handle VBR's (variable bitrate encoded MP3's) as long as they observe the 224kilobit ceiling the players decoder has.  

You can create up to eight (seven with files in the root directory) directories to better help manage the playback of the up to 177 MP3's the unit supports playing back. Remember, the unit doesn't have ID3 tag support, so browsing to a particular song or group of songs isn't straightforward. You can use directories to help manage the mess though. One thing to consider, is that you don't have to fill a CD full of songs if you don't want to. As cheap as CD-R discs are, if you want to create smaller collections to keep things more manageable, you certainly can. And with CD-RW's you can reuse them over and over. Not quite as flexible as the Compact Flash memory that most MP3 players use, but a damn sight cheaper!

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