The nice thing about a Victor Stream is that you can carry your entire audio
library in one device. It plays specialized files from the NLS BARD site,
Bookshare, and RFB&D (never tried RFB&D personally). It also plays files
from commercial sources like audible, standard mp3 and wav, and now (with
the additional soft pack) iTunes. You can, moreover, listen to text file
formats like txt, rtf, and html. In theory, you can listen to contracted
braille files, but I've found that to be a little glitchy in 3.0 and 3.1.
finally, it's an easy-to-use voice recorder, not as good as, say, the
Olympus, but the quality of the recording is very nice and serves my own
needs perfectly. My own unit has lots of different file types on it,
including music.
Your other questions have been answered. When you insert a blank SD card
into the Stream, Victor places the folder structure on the card. You then
insert the card into your Mac's reader, and move files into the right
folders: music into the music folder, BARD and Bookshare books into the
digital Talking Books folder, rtf and html files into the text folder, etc.
As far as Audible goes, the only thing you need Windows for is activating
the device. The Stream itself with SD card inserted needs to be connected to
the PC via USB cable for activation to take place. that's done once per SD
card. After that, the card is permanently activated unless it becomes
corrupt and needs to be formatted (i.e., erased), so you can forget all
about Windows until you need a new card.
I think people are right about the maximum capacity SD being 16 gb, but
that's an awful lot of listening. I've got an 8 GB card, and I've got 40
BARD books, 9 audible books, 12 book-length text files, and a couple of
albums worth of music on mine.
Last, the Stream has some nice bookmarking features that make it useful for
work. Bookmarks can be points to jump to, audio blocks to listen to, and
brief voice recordings to refer to. that's all very handy when you're, say,
reading a manual because you can essentially takes notes and refer to them
quickly.
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