Dell's Digital Jukebox 20 - Music, the Dell Way

Dell's Digital Jukebox 20 - Interface (continued)

Selecting "now playing" from the main menu brings you to the two screens that initially pop up when the Dell DJ is started. The only difference is that you can be navigate to these screens from within the main menu.

The easiest way to compile a playlist is to add a bunch of tracks to the selected music and save that as a playlist. It is nice that the playlists offer the ability to name using capital letters and spaces, but it is a bit hard to navigate because you will have to use the scroll dial to add each character to the playlist name. It would have been nice to be able to use phrases and words to search for a particular track, album, artist, playlist, and genre in the respective sub-menus. It should be easy to add this feature - Creative just needs to extend the query option and change the interface a bit, which they already have in place for naming playlists.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

The "play mode" option selection allows the user to manipulate the order/priority of playing the selected music with the normal, repeat track, repeat all, shuffle, shuffle repeat, and track once options.

Increasing/decreasing the volume is done via the volume buttons to the left side of the DJ. The volume screen will pop up for a few seconds no matter where you are in the OS, and is similar to the one used for the Muvo series, though it doesn't take up the entire screen.

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Click to enlarge.

Hitting the voice recording option brings you to a sub-menu similar to the one for playlists, albums, artists, and genres. The difference is that there are no categories here, as each recording entry is counted as a single track. The date and time of when the recording ended is used as the recording name.

Note that the date and time in our snapshot is incorrect. This is because we took the picture shortly after taking the unit apart, which restarted the internal clock. Hooking up the Dell DJ to the computer installed with the correct drivers will automatically update the clock to the computer's time when the DJ is accessed.

An actual recording can be made by pressing the record button on the left side of the Digital Jukebox, which brings you to a new voice recordings menu that can be only accessed by the record button. At this point, the backlight automatically shuts off until you exit the voice recordings screen.

Initializing a recording brings a screen with a sound meter, track progress, track time, and recording status displayed. The sound meter is fairly modest, as it isn't good enough to be used to make good lecture hall recordings, but it is suited well for meetings in small rooms and personal reminders.

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Click to enlarge.

The voice recording entry is counted among the audio tracks in the music library, but also can be played back by the preview option from the sub-menu if you select the track with the scroll dial.

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Click to enlarge.

The settings and information buttons are very straight forward. The owner name can be changed in a similar method as naming a playlist, which there are no options available to change in the information screen. The DJ does feature more preset EQ settings (off, acoustic, classical, disco, jazz, new age, pop, rock, vocal) than we are accustomed to seeing, which is nice for the "no hassle" side of things, as well as the ability to customize the 4-band setting.

Recently, Dell added an FM tuner to the list of possible accessories, and in order to take advantage of this feature, the firmware needs to be updated to version 1.20.03 (A02), currently the latest from Dell. Our unit was shipped with version 1.00.09 (A00), and we updated to 1.10.05 (A01) and A02. We didn't have any problems upgrading or downgrading, though some have mentioned it. If at all possible, we recommend at least upgrading to A01, since there are a few interface changes (noted on firmware update page).

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The only difference in A02 is the voice recordings; selecting from the main menu changes to recordings to accommodate the ability to record from the FM channel. Selecting recordings allows you to select between the two functions. We didn't have a FM tuner to test it out, but from what we gather, recordings from the FM source are accomplished via the FM dongle.

In an effort to keep things simple, the backlight and idle shutdown options only allow the choices of: off, 5 seconds, 15 seconds, and 30 seconds, while the contrast ranges from 0 to 100 in 10-unit increment selections.

We should note that the backlight is automatically disabled if the DJ is locked. There is no way to change this particular setting.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.