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>> Hi I'm Donald Bell, senior for MP3 and Digital Audio here at CNET. And today we're taking a first look at the Toshiba Gigabeat U. The Gigabeat U is a 99 dollar, two-gigabyte flash MP3 player. It supports MP3, WMA, WAV files. It also supports DRN protected subscription and purchased music content. It's a very light and very well constructed MP3 player. It's got a metallic exterior. It really feels like you could drop this on the ground and step on it and it would still survive the crash. It's got an FM radio, photo viewer and one of the best features on this player is the high quality line input recording that you can do with it. The line input recording goes through the headphone jack which usually means you can't monitor the recording you're making which can be really frustrating. But the, the Gigabeat U actually shows a line input level meter, so that you can see exactly how loud the recording is that you're making. It encodes the line input signal to a stereo MP3 file with a 128-kilobyte MP3 file. It automatically detects the silences between songs and splits the tracks. And when you're done recording, it'll even pause the recording when it detects that the silence and nothing else is coming into line input. So it's a great feature for people who want to bypass their computer and rip their CD collection directly to an MP3 player. Even though it's a one-inch OLED screen, the music player supports album artwork. So you can even see a little tiny square of your album's cover artwork on the MP3 player which is a nice touch. Our only real complaint on the Gigabeat U is that the user interface, although it's really easy to use, the graphics on the interface are kind of cheesy. We like it. We like the price. We like all the formats it supports. It's a great little 99-dollar Nano competitor MP3 player. I'm Donald Bell and that was a first look at the Toshiba Gigabeat U.
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