The Player

M3po is a CD player for your stereo. Of course it's a little different than a CD player though. It allows CD's to have MP3 files on them or you can install a hard drive into the player and play MP3's from there. So how does this benefit the user? Since MP3's are compressed with a 1:11 ratio on a normal song on a CD (Using a WAV format), it allows you to store many more songs on each CD, in fact, about 11 songs in place of each song on a normal CD. That means that a burned CD with MP3's can fit 130 5MB songs on each CD. If each of those songs were 3 minutes long, you would have 6.5 hours of music from each CD you burn and play on the m3po. Since CD media is so cheap nowadays, you can really save a lot of money.

A great feature with the m3po is the ability to install a hard drive and store MP3's on that and play off of it. So if you had a 30GB hard drive (Which goes for well under $200 nowadays) you could fit 6000 5MB songs, which, if they were 3 minutes each, would be 18,000 minutes, or 300 hours, or 12.5 days of straight music. Do you get my drift here? That's a lot of music! By the way, it does play regular CD's as well.

Have you seen the picture of the player? This is one sleek looking thing, and I'm proud to have it stacked in with the rest of my stereo. Definitely looks very high-tech, so if looks are important to you, you need not worry with the m3po.

The LCD screen and its options are based on a small "operating system" integrated into the player. This means that Terratec can release updates and fixes, and can just be installed by burning the update on a CD-R or CD-RW and installing it from the player, which they have release by the way.

If you are thinking about installing a hard drive into your m3po player, it's very easy. You simply place it into the slot, put the IDE cable in, put the power cable in, and follow the on-screen instructions to format the drive on the LCD screen. Make sure the hard drive is 3.5" because that is what will fit. Here's a shot with and without the a hard drive:

With hard drive

Without hard drive