Abbee Commercial-Free FM Radio Review

Using the Abbee

Once everything is hooked up, the Abbee will start recording itself. You don’t have to do anything. The Abbee will build a music library from the station it is set on and will automatically record songs. This usually takes about 24 hours, so you have to be a little patient. After 24 hours, you can listen to the recorded music.

The Abbee has built-in speakers that have good sound quality. You can listen to your recorded music on the Abbee by pressing the Mode button until the screen says “Play,” as seen in Figure 6.

Figure 6: The Screen on the Abbee

What you will hear is the music that Abbee recorded from the radio with the commercials removed. In our tests, the Abbee was amazingly accurate. The only time that it recorded the disk jockey’s voice was when there was music in the background, as in a musical intro. This happened only occasionally, so it really wasn’t bothersome.

When listening to recorded music collected by the Abbee, you can mark any song you like as a Favorite by pressing the Favorite button on the top of the device. The unit responds by locking that song into memory. Pressing and holding down the Favorites button will tell Abbee that you don’t like the song. It will respond by immediately deleting it.

The Abbee’s Music Lock portable player is shown in Figure 7. As you can see, it is a simple device with a small silver handle. The connector that is seen attached to the Music Lock can be removed or used to attach the included lanyard.

The Music Lock is easy to use. Press the large button in the middle to turn it on. Press the same button to pause the music. Press and hold to turn the device off. The status of the device is shown by a blue play light and a red pause light on the button.

Figure 7: The Music Lock

The forward and back buttons are clearly marked, as are the + and – buttons for the volume. In between the forward and back buttons is one shaped like a large star. This button functions like the star button on the Abbee. Press to lock in a favorite song. Press and hold to delete a song. There is an audio beep to le
t you know that the function was accomplished.

The bottom of the Music Lock is shown in Figure 8 where you see a Lock slider button that keeps the unit from being turned on or off inadvertently, a standard headphone jack, and a reset button.

Figure 8: The Music Lock bottom

The real beauty of the Abbee is two-fold.

1. The music it records is totally free. There is no charge for the music and there are no subscription fees.
2. Everything is done automatically, so you don’t have to worry about uploading or downloading music. In fact, you don’t even need a computer.

When using the Abbee you can choose to listen to live radio or the music that Abbee has recorded. As you mark your favorites, you will fill the Music Lock with music you likem yet the Abbee is always in control. You cannot see what songs you have recorded. You cannot listen to a certain song at a given time.

You may also have to be somewhat trusting, because there will be times when you cannot really know what Abbee is doing. Although syncing of the Music Lock was generally fairly speedy, there were times when the syncing of the Music Lock took over two hours. We also had times when the Abbee said in big blue letters that it was “EMPTY”. We realized that everything had been transferred to the Music Lock, and were quite surprised that they were deleted from the Abbee. Did that mean we had to record for another 24 hours? There were also times when the Abbee said “WAIT,” and we didn’t know what we were waiting for.

When we wanted to play live music for the Abbee to record, but we didn’t want to listen to it, we pressed the Volume button to turn on the mute function. We quickly found that Abbee displayed “MUTE” in large blue letters, as shown in Figure 9. We found that a bit aggravating. We would have rather seen it display the time and put the mute notification in smaller letters. In Figure 9, you will also see that the Abbee screen always says “Myine” on the right side. Myine obviously thinks this is good advertising, but we found it aggravating and a waste of screen space.

Figure 9: The Mute indicator

You can record about 500 songs on the Music Lock. We could not find any documentation for how many songs you can record on the Abbee itself.

As you work with the Abbee, older content is replaced with newer content. The Abbee will record newer content over the older content on the Abbee whether it is locked or unlocked. Only locked music that has been transferred to the Music Lock will not be deleted from the Music Lock unless you press and hold the star button on the Music Lock to delete it. We would have preferred to have our favorite music available on the Abbee as well as the Music Lock, so we could listen to music we like at home as well as on the road.

For a device that is based on simplicity, the Abbee has a pretty complex system. Having read the user guide from front to back, we still don’t understand how it all works.

One complaint we had is that you can never actually see how much of the music is marked as favorites, so you don’t know how much room is left to record new music.

It you want to record talk shows, you can do so by pressing the record button to start manual recording during which the Abbee records everything on that radio station. You must also press the record button to stop the recording. The Abbee is only capable of doing 30 minutes of manual recording, which is not enough for most radio talk shows.