TDK MOJO Portable CD-MP3 Digital Jukebox with 8 Minute Anti-Shock and Artist, Title, Genre, and Album Directory

by TDK

Product Details

Product Manual [2.95mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches ; 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005MMCL
• Item model number: MOJO
• Batteries: 2 AA batteries required.
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From Digital Living Today

The advantage of MP3-CD players like the TDK MOJO, is that in addition to being able to play regular CDs you can also play back MP3 CDs, which can hold up to 10 hours of music. Although technically, the audio quality of the MP3 is slightly diminished by the compression, the naked ear is hard-pressed to tellthe difference. Another benefit of MP3 encoding is that you can organize each track with information about musical style, artist, album, and song title. With up to 150 tracks on an MP3-CD, organization becomes crucial.

Unfortunately, most MP3-CD players require the unit to scan the entire disc when you put it in to organize the information. This takes unwanted startup time. TDK's MOJO is an MP3 CD Player that comes with its own software to quickly categorize the tracks it reads from an MP3-CD and retitle them in a way that allows you to organize your tracks more quickly and in enhanced ways. Combine this with the MOJO's smart design, EQ features and, best of all, a whopping 8 minute anit-skip feature--enough to avoid even the most violent, hiccup-causing bumps, and you have a top contender for your next portable CD player.

From the Manufacturer

TDK's first CD digital jukebox is a portable, CD-based MP3 player offering full artist, song title, album, and musical genre navigation as well as on-the-go playlist creation. Dubbed MOJO for the magic it adds to the portable music experience, the device combines the economy and unlimited storage capacity of CD-based MP3 players with the navigational flexibility of expensive solid-state and hard-disk-based devices.

The key to MOJO's enhanced functionality is TDK's exclusive Navitrack navigation technology (patent pending), which enables MOJO to quickly read and sort the music ID information contained in each MP3 file (known as ID3 tags). In just a few seconds, Navitrack scans every music file on an MP3-encoded CD and displays this information on MOJO's bright, backlit four-line LCD screen. Find the music you want to hear by artist, album, song title, and musical genre. Equally exciting, MOJO is the first portable CD-MP3 player to allow users to create custom playlists. And MOJO remembers playlists created for up to five MP3-CD discs.

Unlike power-hogging hard-disk-based MP3 devices, MOJO plays for up to 10 hours on two high-capacity AA batteries. MOJO's superior play-time capability is the result of advanced power management circuitry that fills the unit's antishock memory buffer with up to eight minutes of MP3 music, then pauses the CD drive motor to conserve energy.

MOJO gains its digital jukebox functionality with a unique software breakthrough that avoids the file-navigation limitations of conventional CD-MP3 players. Conventional CD-MP3 players cannot offer file navigation because of the nature of the ID3 tag information, which is typically appended to the end of an MP3 file. To read this information, a disc-based player must scan through every file, a time-consuming operation on a disc that can contain in excess of 150 songs.

MOJO's Navitrack system eliminates this limitation with a PC-based software utility that copies the ID3 information into the MP3 file-name area. With the data now accessible at the head of each file, MOJO can scan, sort, display, and grant access to artist, title, and genre information in just seconds.

Using the supplied Navitrack software is fast and easy. Tracks ripped with Internet-enabled software packages like MusicMatch Jukebox are converted automatically in a process that takes just seconds. And Navitrack gives users the opportunity to edit ID3 tag information, an important feature for music ripped without your computer's having had a chance to access the CDDB online music database (or when you're ripping discs not included in this database).

TDK includes MusicMatch Jukebox 6.0 software with the MOJO player. MusicMatch handles ripping, MP3 conversion, track labeling (with Internet access), PC music management, and CD burning in an easy-to-use integrated package. With TDK Navitrack software and MusicMatch Jukebox, MOJO is a complete portable music platform for everyone who owns a Windows-based CD burner.

MOJO is truly the ultimate portable music machine. Its preset equalizer settings (rock, jazz, classical, etc.), plus bass boost, let listeners tailor sound quality to their personal preferences. In addition, MOJO includes a line-out connection for playback through an external audio system.

MOJO comes with bass-enhanced high-fidelity headphones, an AC power adapter, and two high-capacity AA alkaline batteries.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best, August 7, 2001

By 

Chuck - See all my reviews

This review is from: TDK MOJO Portable CD-MP3 Digital Jukebox with 8 Minute Anti-Shock and Artist, Title, Genre, and Album Directory (Electronics)

TDK's Mojo is one of the best MP3/CD players out there, with 8-minute anti-skip protection for MP3 and 45-second for CD's. It also comes with impressive software on 1 disc for your computer.

The contents of the disc are as follows: TDK Navitrack Software will allow you to rename MP3 files by copying Artist, Title, and Genre information into the filename; and MusicMatch Jukebox is a music management program for ripping and encoding MP3's.

The requirements for use of this software are fairly minimal, including WIN 95 or higher, pentium 150 or higher, 32 MB of RAM or higher, and a soundcard. The TDK Mojo will also display ID3 tags (Title, Artist, Genre) and FIF (Field in Filename).

Because of this FIF feature on the Mojo, it is fairly easy to create playlists. With some MP3/CD players, I've heard that it is nearly impossible to find the songs you want, or very hard to navigate to them. TDK has solved this problem. If you have a directory structure set up on a CD-RW or CD-R, you can access the songs almost any way you want (e.g. Mojo can display all artists, or all songs by a particular artist, etc.).

The sound is also impressive, as well as the price, for so many features. There are many settings to make the sound better, like EQ settings, bass settings, etc. There are many other features (small and thin size, light weight; big, easy-to-read backlit LCD; hold button, etc.) and good reasons to buy the Mojo instead of another MP3/CD player, but I can't discuss them all. The manual explains everything and guides you through the use of the features in an easy and orderly fashion.

The only thing that bothered me with this product, although a minute bother, was the fact that when playing certain discs, the Mojo would make a quiet droning noise. Don't misunderstand me, though, there is no problem with the unit, it just does that because it is reading the disc so fast in order to read extra data into the memory buffer to eliminate skipping. Overall, I would chose the Mojo first, and second, the Rio Volt because they are the best two out there.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some minor problems,, November 1, 2001

By 

"flowbeus" - See all my reviews

This review is from: TDK MOJO Portable CD-MP3 Digital Jukebox with 8 Minute Anti-Shock and Artist, Title, Genre, and Album Directory (Electronics)

Just got this thing, and I'm generally pleased, however there are few things that I would change about it.

Pros:
Backlit screen is awesome.
Navigation with buttons and in menus is easy and intuitive.
Headphones are not bad though cord is a little short.
Comes with batteries!

Cons:
Contrary to what it says above, you can't navigate by album, it's just Title, Artist, or Genre, or you can navigate through the directory structure. The directory structure navigation is especially useful if you use the following structure: Artist->Album->Songs.

Making a playlist is easy and very useful, but you can't specify any order to the songs in the playlist. With random mode off, they are played in the order they were burned to the CD, which might be annoying if your CD burning software burns the files in an arbitrary order like mine does. This means there is no way to tell the player to play songs in the normal order on an MP3 album. I haven't tried the included software yet, maybe that burns the files in alphanumeric order, I'll report back. I really wish there was a way to queue up songs though.

Renaming all my mp3 files is tedious. The Navitrack software doesn't automate the conversion of mass files to the proper naming format unless the ID3 tags are setup right, and mine are certainly not.

The plug for the AC power source is not the same size as the one that goes with the tape/cig lighter/car kit power plug I have, it's slightly smaller. Why can't they just make them all the same size? Be aware that you may need a TDK compliant car kit. The AC adapter plug also doesn't stay snug, it's a right angle plug, and it likes to turn itself with the cord pointing down, which interferes with the surface it's resting on.

Wow I'm pretty picky. Despite these minor compatability issues and left out features, the player works really well, and what it does offer is pretty impressive for such a low price. The bluish 4-line display and interface really make it fun to browse through your music.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A great MP3/CD player, but not for exercising--fair software, October 9, 2001

By 

M. E. Rose (Hickam AFB, HI (Oahu) United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: TDK MOJO Portable CD-MP3 Digital Jukebox with 8 Minute Anti-Shock and Artist, Title, Genre, and Album Directory (Electronics)

I bought this player to jog with after reading other reviews on Amazon that cited the 8 minute MP3 buffer is good for exercising. Within minutes of going on my first run with it, it stopped playing, and then continued not playing until I stopped running. At the time, it was being carried in a special Panasonic jogging belt for CD players. I've since found that I can jog with it if I hold it in my hand carefully and do not move it very much (if at all), but that's really a pain to do.

The player's interface is great, and I hardly needed the manual. The Navitrack software is not user friendly, and will not easily convert your MP3 files to FIF format--you have to go directory by directory through your MP3s, which is daunting to do with over 10GBs of MP3s on my computer. Also, the instructions do not mention this, but converting your files will render them unreadable in MusicMatch until you re-map the music library after conversion. The FIF format allows the player to easily read the ID3 tag information at the front of the MP3 file, rather than in the back like normal--and allows very easy navigation and custom playlists.

The player is well-built and the sound quality is surprisingly good. It does go through batteries at a greater rate if you do anything other than listen to it without interuption at a low volume; 10 hours is rather optimistic in my experience, so have some extra AAs.

I will use this player in my car and on my motorcycle, but not for jogging. For none-active applications, it will provide hours and hours of great music. Don't buy it jogging (or other active/jarring activities) is one of it's purposes for you--get a solid state memory player instead.