Entempo Rubato 20 GB MP3 Player

by Entempo

Product Details

Product Manual [627kb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0007Q3BF8
• Item model number: RUBATO200001
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #267,542 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)

Product Description

Life is all about bumps and grinds. Many MP3 players just don't always survive the pratfalls of one's daily existence. That's where the Rubato comes in. The Rubato uses a technology called "ShoX" for better protection from bumps which can cause hard drive based music players to skip. Other interesting features of this device include support of MP3 and WMA (including DRM) music files, special software called MusicMagic which can create a "sounds like" playlist based upon acoustical analysis of songs in the owner's collection, a FM tuner, voice recording through special earbuds and USB 2.0 high speed file transfers of music and other types of data.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good, cheap solution for portable music., September 21, 2005

By 

D. Beutel "geek" (Redmond, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Entempo Rubato 20 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

I bought the Rubato for one reason and one reason alone: it was the cheapest 20GB MP3 player I've come across in my quest for portable music. Others writing reviews on here seem to expect to pay Geo Metro prices and receive Rolls Royce quality, and whether consumer electronics or cars, this is simply not the case.

The good:
* 20GB of capacity, not much bigger than an iPod, and much cheaper
* NO drivers or proprietary software to install (unless you really want to, it does come with MusicMatch and a few other programs)
* USB 2.0 makes for *fast* transfers. (Anybody complaining about transfer speeds when copying 20GB of music needs to go look at th average sustained transfer speed of a modern hard drive... it's about 5MB / sec... the drive is the bottleneck here, not the USB connection.)
* Aside from a bit of background noise (from the screen backlight, hdd spinning up), the sound quality is amazingly good, especially when played through a good-quality set of headphones (I'm using Sennheiser HD-497's).

The bad:
* Looks and feels cheap (what do you expect, you spent < $200 on a 20GB MP3 player?)
* Player takes a while in "index" songs after transferring (this is the price you pay for not having to install software on your PC, the player does all of this instead of your fast computer)
* Background noise, more/less noticable depending on the medium that its being played through. Certain things (tape adapter in the car, cheap headphones) tend to bring this out more. The noise is almost unnoticable on my Sennheisers.

Conclusion:
All in all I feel this is a solid buy in the sub $200 range for those looking for capacity but without a lot of money to spend. I haven't had mine long enough to comment on long-term durability, and from initial impressions I don't think I'd want to drop it from more than about 6", but only time will tell. If cost and capacity are your main criteria and you don't expect your player to see much abuse, this is the player for you.

39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Rubato.......Not the answer!, June 19, 2005

By 

mentalmike (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entempo Rubato 20 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

Well before I start I want to say something to the ignorant users that used this review system to dispute the meaning of the products name or maybe to show how smart they think they are, jerks, you mess up the ratings by adding your stupid comments about the name of the product. Who cares about the name , if it is called the Entempo Dog Poop I guess we will argue that it actually translates to the Entempo Canine Feces!

Ok,

Well I recieved my Rubato expecting it to be the best MP3 player I ever had, wow what surprise.......

I started by charging the player for 3 hours like the manual says, what the manual doesnt say is that the player will never stop saying that it is charging and say its full while it is plugged in.

Then I loaded my music onto it with the regular windows explorer , yes it is just like a hard drive so if you want to add music or take music off of the player to put on your PC just plug it in and open My Computer and drag & drop your files (other players should take note of that feature!) It took 1 hour to load 2600 songs.

Ok then i unplugged the USB cable only to find out when you unplug the player from usb it updates (indexes) which is painfully slow it took about 1 hour 15 minutes to finish this.

Ok so the music is on, How do i play the tracks? (other players i have had have just been load on the music and press play to play all the tracks randomly )O my god I wanted to trash this thing, after many hours of messing with it I finally figured it out, you must hook it up to your pc and make a playlist including all the songs and on the player load the playlist then choose tracks and then play (it all sounds so simple now)

My next problem is the noise, there is alot of faint background noise in your headphones stuff like the harddrive spinning up or the backlight coming on or the shox technology kicking (whenever it senses a bump you can hear a faint beep) I have never had player with background noise like this, I have had many players, mp2go , nex ia , nomad i , ipod mini, they have all been excellent compared to this one.

My next gripe is the time between songs, sometimes it not bad 2-5 seconds, other times its 5-10 seconds that is painfully slow (go ahead and count to 10 slowly)especially when during that time you hear the faint background noises i descibed.

My conclusion would be that this is overpriced for the quality, O did i mention the cheap plastic? it feels like a cheap walkman from the 99 cent store. Mine is a little loose , I geuss the scews arent quite tight enough, theres gaps on the case edges that go together when i lightly squeeze it.

Audiophile's definetly look elsewhere, other's if want a player like this one dont choose this model I would recommed the Entempo spirit 20gb over this because of the price $100 cheaper. But I would think it probablly has the same noise issues.

For me it is all about the sound quality and
this is by no means worth the money, Look elsewhere

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not the best- you get what you pay for..., September 22, 2005

By 

Cuervo "ejp0001" (Illinois USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entempo Rubato 20 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

Cons: Did not like the very, very small characters on the display. You have to squint to read the display. The radio has terrible reception. The forward button does not forward fast enough for Podcast forwarding. Does not allow you to bookmark a spot on a Podcast. The nylon case does not have a belt clip. The side buttons need to be pressed too hard to use.
Pros: I like the price and the capacity. But had to send back because of mainly the small character display...