Waitec CLIPP portable CD-Recorder / MP3 player - Page 2

Playback tests

For these tests we created all the available encoding modes of MP3 files (VBR,CBR), WMA files and audio CDs. The MP3 / WMA files we used were the following:

Waitec CLIPP played almost all the files with no problem. The drive could not playback the 48kbps WMA file, and there were some audible glitches in the 64kbps WMA file, as well. However, we experienced some problems as we were playing with the control buttons. The button response was not so fast and the skip forward / back buttons were not always accurate. Waitec could work on this a little more since these operations during portable use are possibly the most popular.

Another weak point of the drive could be the fact that if you accidentally press the eject button during playback, the lid will open before the media have stopped spinning.

The playback was smooth and no interruptions were occurred even when we listened to our favorite music while jogging :)

CD-Recording tests

We connected the drive to the test PC through the USB cable. Waitec CLIPP can burn up to 185MB of data in 8cm CD-R media.

We burned the data with Nero Burning Rom v5.5.8.2. As Nero reports, the drive supports 4x max recording speed.

Although the Waitec CLIPP does not support any buffer underrun protection system, we did not experience any buffer problems, hopefully due to the limited supported recording speed. On the other hand, the lack of CD-RW media recording should be considered as a drawback.

Battery operation

In order to test the duration of batteries when the Waitec CLIPP was not connected to the power adapter, we fully charged the battery set for 3 hours and started the continuous playback of various MP3, WAV, audio files. Also we used the CLIPP as a recorder connected to our test PC.

Waitec stopped the playback after3 hours of continuous operation. The duration is not the officially stated by Waitec but the pause / play / forward / back operations we did during playback possibly consumed more battery power than expected.

The battery powered recording test showed that the drive can continuously record for about 1 hour, without any problems.