The Toshiba gigabeat MP3/WMA player and photo viewer demonstrates that the electronics company has been watching and learning from the competition. The styling of the player and the size of its screen make it a stand-out in a crowded field. What really sets the gigabeat apart, though, is its software — the "gigabeat room." It has an intuitively simple layout, and has a few features not found in the competition's software.

On the gigabeat's dock are control buttons to sync the player and initial "RipRec."

Case and controls

Substantial — that was my first impression of the Toshiba gigabeat. The 20GB player I tried out was only a tenth of an ounce heavier than its Apple iPod counterpart, but its brushed aluminum casing and metal side panel gave it a nice, sturdy feel.

It took me a little while to fully master navigation, as some of the controls changed function depending on what menu I was in. In addition to the dedicated "Menu" button, for example, the "On" button is also used to call up menus. Practice made perfect, though, and I was soon flipping through screens with ease.

Music transfer

I loaded the gigabeat room software onto my PC, and was soon ready to start transferring songs. The software gave me the choice of using either it or Windows Media Player 10 to manage my music. This can be a real plus if you're comfortable with the Windows program, as you don't have to learn new procedures to use the gigabeat.

I stuck with the gigabeat room, though, because it had some interesting features that Windows Media Player didn't. Normally, to transfer music to an MP3 player, I have to import the tracks I want from the CD onto the PC's hard drive, and then move them from the computer over to the player. This takes a little while, and sometimes can be a real problem when I don't have a lot of free hard drive space. The gigabeat room's "RipRec" function let me bypass the PC's hard drive and fly the tracks directly from the CD into the player. There's actually a button on the player's dock for this, to make it even easier.

The software's graphic display for "RipRec" tracks the transfer's progress from CD to player.

I just loaded a CD, selected the tracks I wanted, and then pressed the button on the dock. The software has a nice graphic display that showed where it was in each stage of the process. I found it took about five minutes to transfer a full CD; most of that time involved converting the tracks to WMA format. For WMA-encoded CDs, the process went a lot faster.

In the gigabeat room, everything's laid out for easy navigation.

With the gigabeat room program, I could access the music on the player and organize it easily. I could create folders for different styles of music, and tweak the track settings individually. Clicking on a track, I could also open up a window that let me edit all of the information, as well as adjust the EQ and volume setting for that track. I even had the option of changing the album cover art.

With Track Edit, you can customize track info, volume and EQ settings — even album art.

PlaysForSure compatibility

The gigabeat's box sports the "PlaysForSure" logo, which means it is fully compatible with music stores that also carry the logo. The start-up disc comes with an interface for Napster, a "PlaysForSure" music download site. The interface is fairly smooth, and it's easy to download purchased or rented songs to the gigabeat. The same was true for other "PlaysForSure"-approved sites, such as MSN Music.

Playing music on the gigabeat

Of course, the gigabeat had all the options found in most other players. I could play all my tunes in order, or completely at random. With the gigabeat room I could create playlists for different moods, and either listen to the playlist as I had arranged it, or hear just those selections in random order.

When a song is playing, volume can be controlled either by the touchpad or the side volume control. It's good to have that side control. To change volume on the touch pad, I had to tap up or down; if I slid my finger, I tended to accidentally go up a level into a menu.

The gigabeat comes with 28 EQ presets, so I could really fine-tune the sound. Some of them are genre-related, such as "Vocal 1," "Jazz 2," and "Latin 1." Others boost bass and or overall volume. There are also three SRS WOW™ settings, a technology that creates the illusion of 3D audio. Especially for tracks that I wanted to sound "bigger," such as classical orchestral music, it was a nice option to have.

Bookmarking tunes

The "Bookmark" feature was an option I grew to appreciate as I loaded more tunes onto the gigabeat. Basically, I could tag my favorite songs with a bookmark. When I selected the Bookmark folder and pressed play, only the bookmarked tunes played. With the 20GB player, I had the potential to store almost 5,000 songs. Having a shortcut to my personal faves was a real plus.