Pretty soon the collection of CD’s I have will have outgrown the corner of the house assigned to its storage. I’m not sure how many there are – it would take too long to count…
Although I have the majority of my collection on Apple iTunes (c.55,000 tracks of music) I wanted something a little more permanent. As I recently had a Birthday (which I have tried to forget) there seemed a good opportunity to get a Brennan JB7 – a music machine which rips your music into MP3. By all accounts it was a good solution – except for the fact that I would have to manually load all of my CD’s again.
So last month I started the process – with the intention then of storing my CD collection away. But it all went wrong, quickly. The CD mechanism broke and the unit had to go back after 10 days. Brennan did include a compliment slip saying “Mechanism replaced”. Never apologise, never explain then?
Then I started to notice that the CD register didn’t recognise quite a few of the tracks – and simply labels them “Track 1″ – which isn’t helpful for searching.And it got worse as I found so many albums unrecognised. Thus making a long process worse! I did email them and they replied 9 days later explaining that “they realised it was complex to rename tracks” (presumably for non-technical people like me). I don’t need patronising.
So, I now have a USB keyboard plugged into the unit whilst I have to rename hundreds of tracks.
It’s a great bit of kit – and looks cool. But it is proving painful. And they need to sort their customer service out.
Sounds like a good excuse to buy an iMac just dedicated to your music
)
Already got several Paul!!
Hi Tim,
Just wondered if you’d finally got all your music ‘Brennan-ed’? I have had a battle with them over their incomplete database. I can guarantee that all of your CDs are recognised by the freedb server; mine were. (The free software ‘Audiograbber’ links directly live to freedb.) That dreadful Brennan mini-remote – aargh! Like you I will have to painfully key in heaps of albums/tracks. The JB7 is the only piece of hardware, where my CDs often refuse to be recognised. I don’t feel I could wade through all my vinyl and MP3s now. Sorry, just wanted to moan and disappointed that someone else has struggled with their customer service.
Cheers!
Barbara, not yet! It’s still work in progress. I have loaded 2,500 tracks – I estimate I have c. 60,000+ The recognition CD is poor – some 1970′s albums aren’t recognised and the manual entry is tedious to say the least. I have no idea why they don’t use CDDB like iTunes – which seems to have a 99% hit rate to the untrained eye!