I was so excited when my mom told me she had purchased this for my 3 year old son for Christmas. He LOVES my brother's ancient Fisher Price carry along cassette player with microphone so I thought it'd be nice for him to play his CDs. I had looked previously and every CD/MP3 player with microphone(s) was SO expensive! Shockingly when you know they're not as high quality as a regular "boombox" but are double or triple the price. Well, my mom got this on sale and we were thrilled. We saw no reviews of it first, but I had read reviews of every other "competitive" product and they all had consistently mixed ratings (love it or totally doesn't work).
So Christmas came and my son gets his CD player and a brand new Little People CD. We put in batteries, turn it on, the CD starts....and it stops. We try again, it starts...and it stops. It won't play through the entire first song, and it won't skip to any subsequent songs. We tried two other CDs before deciding the CD player was definitely the problem. My brother is a computer technician and said it was the laser reader (? right?) and that he couldn't fix it. Luckily, the store let us exchange it even though my mom bought it in October (And it was now after Christmas). The second one plays entire CDs! It is very sensitive, so if you bump it the CD will quit playing for a second but I kind of expected that from a child's toy. One microphone seems to work better than another but that may be because my son basically licks them while he's talking. :/
I rater it 3 because the first was a 0 but the last was at least a 4, maybe even a 5 due to the price. Based on the other two reviews it looks as though ordering this is going to be a gamble on whether you get a working unit or not.