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08/08/2004 |
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Creative Soundblaster MP3+ Iain Laskey tries out something small, cute and silver from Creative Labs
It’s not always easy or convenient to open your PC to install a new soundcard. You may just not like the idea of physically opening the machine. It may be you are a laptop owner and plagued by their notoriously poor audio capabilities. In either case, if you need to upgrade your machine’s sound capabilities, the Creative SoundBlaster MP3+ is just what the doctor ordered Installation Being a USB device, you simply need to install the drivers, plug it in to a USB socket and away you go. The MP3+ takes its power from the USB connection so no external power pack is needed which is a major plus point. Our test system had Windows XP and an existing onboard sound card. After installation both the original sound card and the new external MP3+ worked fine. We decided to disable the onboard sound via the BIOS for the purposes of further testing though.
Hardware The unit itself is small, light and comes with a bracket for easy attachment to a laptop screen. Despite its size it has a generous selection of socketry. There are left/right line in and out connectors (gold plated) as well optical (TOSLink) in and out on one side and a headphone output/microphone input on the other. Connecting a pair of headphones disables the output of the line out jacks which is convenient if you want a swap back and forth between the speakers and headphones. A small built in volume thumb wheel and an analogue/digital switch completes the external features. When data flows to the device, a small blue LED on the top flickers which is a useful guide to whether it is working or not. In terms of performance, we’re talking 16bit/48Khz sampling which whilst not as good as it gets these days, is good enough for most people. It will certainly do the business if you want to record your vinyl collection or other analogue sources. Software The software bundle takes up a fair chunk of disk space if you install the lot. The core is Creative’s Media Source organiser/player which catalogues music and provides access to various other modules. Media Source allows you to play/rip MP3s and add EAX audio effects as well as create your own CDs. You can perform some funky time stretch processing which lets you speed up or slow down a piece of music without changing its pitch. This is fun for playing with but of little real value. A more useful trick is Smart Volume Management which helps keep all your songs playing back at similar volume levels irrespective of how loudly they were recorded. When ripping CDs to MP3 format it uses the CDDB service to automatically look up the artist/title information for naming files as they are saved. For those recording from tape or vinyl, you may find the hiss and click filters useful although anyone seriously in to converting their LP collection will want to use more powerful 3rd party tools to perform this role. The software supports Creative’s more up market products and as such has a few options which you’ll not be able to use such as multiple speaker settings. Despite this, there’s an awful lot to play with including a WAV editor, a Minidisk tool and a graphic equaliser. Conclusion The SoundBlaster MP3+ is small, light and does the job admirably. If you want to upgrade your existing soundcard or have one that is playing up and you want an easy way to get something working then you should strongly consider the MP3+. The main outputs are stereo only which may put off a hardened gamer or a DVD fan wanting multi-channel surround sound but for the rest of us, this is a great device at a great price. Creative’s bumper bundle of audio software makes this a highly recommended upgrade for laptop users and even something some desktop users may want to invest in.
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