Nomad Muvo "Rewi

Question

All,
I recently got a Nomad Muvo (just plain Muvo) from Audible.com, and this is my question:
Does the Rewind/Fast Forward on the Muvo just really suck?
or
Is there something wrong with mine?
When I try to rewind, what ends up happening is that the audio sort of stutters, and I can wait for it to stutter around 5 or 6 times and it'll still be maybe ONE second past where I started. If I wait just a few moments longer, it has suddenly rewound a pretty large amount, like 30 seconds to a minute, at least. It isn't like a CD player where it rewinds pretty smoothly and you can more or less tell where in the track you are. The pamphlet I got with the player said that holding the rewind button down was the right way to rewind, and the longer you hold it down, the faster it goes...but this is pretty ridiculous, it's either go back half a second or a whole minute. Has anyone else experienced this, or does it sound like there's something wrong with my Muvo?
I have updated the firmware--no dice. Same deal. I don't want to sound like I'm slamming it, because I really like the device a lot, it's really handy for audio books in particular, but this rewind issue is really a pain. I know it's a small, inexpensi've device, but honestly the way mine is, rewind as a feature is kind of useless...and since when is rewind a feature, I'd expect it to be a given that you can rewind through a track in a way that's useful.
By the way, I seem to be seeing a lot of posts about Muvo's suddenly just not working out of nowhere, after a few weeks. Is that a common thing, an old firmware thing, current issue, etc.
Thanks...

Answer 1

Joymbeer--yeah, it is extremely irritating. The closest workaround I've found is if I hear it "stutter" 0 times or more, it's gonna jump back a lot further than I want it to. What ends up happening is I do the "let it stutter 6 or 7 times" thing several times to get back to somewhere (remotely) close to where I want. So I end up spending a lot of time to go back say, 0 seconds. It's still really inadequate and as I said before, borderline useless as a feature.
Why do we usually rewind? Either we liked something we heard and want to hear it again, or we misunderstood something and need to hear it again. If we can only easily rewind about one second, then what's the point? It takes a second for you to realize you NEED to rewind, and maybe longer to get to the button. So basically, you can only easily rewind to, BEST case, the point at which you REALIZED you needed to rewind! Since I got the Muvo for free (and the fact that they can afford to give you one of these things with a $4.95 subscription fee should have told me something), I deal with it--you get what you pay for, I guess.
Jeremy-CL, it's useful to know that this is normal behavior, and useful to know that this is the same way Audible's Manager works--I haven't tried listening on my PC, so I'll take your word for it. I'd disagree with your description: it'd be more accurate to say that for the first few seconds that the button is held down, it rewinds in TINY, INFINITESIMAL segments. It definitely doesn't allow you to review recent moments quickly, maybe a recent SECOND, but no better than that. I'm not knocking you, but I have to wonder if you've actually tried using one of these things with Audible content. If it worked the way you described, it'd be fine. Anyway, frustrating/useless behavior that is considered normal is still frustrating and/or useless. At least I know that my Muvo isn't broken.
I don't know who to blame--Audible, for distributing a product that doesn't fully support their format, or Creative, for not fully supporting a format that they claim to support. Either way, it's ridiculous. I know Audible has their own proprietary compression scheme (more likely mp3 or wma with their own license management system), but come on, how hard could it possibly be to write some code to enable a proper Rewind function? Maybe an afternoon's work, at most? I guess there aren't enough people that use their Muvos mostly for Audible content that it's worth the effort--it's a reasonable notion, since Creative didn't exactly develop the Muvo for Audible. If Audible's employees write the software to support their content, then they need to get off their tails and do it properly. If it's Creative's guys that are in charge of doing that, then Audible needs to get on their case about it, since it's their customers that are getting schtupped. Somebody's half-ace-ing this in a big way. It makes Creative look bad, because if your devide doesn't work the way you believe it should, who do you immediately blame? The company that made the device, whether it's justified or not--every other Creative product I've ever bought has been great. It is a shame, because I really dig the Muvo, you can't really beat the form factor, and it is more frustrating because I know that it's probably not a hard issue to fix--write some code, offer it in a firmware upgrade, and you're done. If the Rewind feature worked well, I'd be telling all my friends to get one of these things. Anyway--I've gone on far too long.