Customer Reviews

Escient FP-1 Music Manager with Universal Dock for iPod

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This product is a pile of garbage. I have a brand new 80 gig classic Ipod that I have been trying to get to work with this product for over 3 months now. I have structured wiring in my house and I have everything set up to distribute the IR Controls to this unit, and have the video and audio ditributed throughout my house. When the product was actually working, I had to reboot it every three or four days, becuase the software would lock up for no apparent reason. Lately, when I updated my Ipod with new Music, the unit just locks up, claiming it is updating the database. I am on my second unit (the first one was repaired by Escient), and I am now experiencing the same problem. This product should have never been released, it hasn't gone through the proper quality control testing to be released to the general public. Do not buy this unit. This product seemed too good to be true, and it actually is too good to be true, becuase it doesn't work.

I was pretty excited when my AV guy told me that there was a product that could not only dock my IPOD but also play the music I have stored in my iTunes on my PC even without the iPod. And, indeed, the Escient FP-1 Music Manager Universal Dock for iPod does just that. Unfortunately, the software appears to have been written by software engineers whose careers were aborted in the days of MS-DOS 3.1 or maybe Windows 95. The software is slow, klugey, non-intuitive and just plain hard to use. The limitations are truly surprising. If you are are used to the flexibility, ease of use, and design of iTunes, you may despair and just stop trying to work with this woefully inadequate software. It's really too bad because the product hardware works pretty well (even if the latency of response is pretty slow). A complete overhaul of the software, not a simple patch, would be imperative for me to consider increasing my rating from 2/5.

I've had this for about a year and a half, and have never been able to get it to work. I have a rack system feeding my house, and phillips pronto remotes, and despite hours of labor for my A/V techs (who I trust know their stuff), we can't get it to work.. it constantly locks up....i have the nuvo system and will get the nuvo wireless ipod dock for when guests are here wanting to play their ipod..otherwise i can play my mac music and control it / view the display throughout the house so don't even need to plug in my personal ipod.. i just play straight from itunes...

don't waste your money..

escient is a great product, i control it with a philips tsu 9600 and
rfx 9600, this is a music client, you will need to buy a music server or connect an ipod.
i will give a three star because to controll it with the computer web page is very slow. They need to make a software to speed thing up..