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MP3 players

Thanks All!

Thanks all, this has been an incredibly informative 2 weeks. About the only bad thing will be that my family will now look at me to be the MP3 expert. And whatever technology I get will be outdated by, well...what time is it now?

After a lot of looking and dickering we wound up purchasing the 40-gig Zen Xtra from Creative.

Wanted to 20 GB, but they were out. got the 40 GB model for $15 more, figured it was a great buy and went with it.

Chances are it will spend a big chunk of time in the living room or in the car; the gent we're purchasing it for is a recent kidney transplant recipient and, since it was an incompatible-type transplant, makes fairly frequent trips to Baltimore (about 6 hours).

Now to go and see if I can find one of those FM Radio items that allow you to play it over your car radio....
 
Re: Thanks All!

ShowMe said:

Now to go and see if I can find one of those FM Radio items that allow you to play it over your car radio....
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Alternatively, if your car has a cassette player, you can get adapters that plug in the the headphone socket at one end and have a tape caessete shaped object at the other. Saves mucking around with tuning.

I think mine was from WalMart, but there seem to be plenty around - $10 to $15 ish.
 
After a similar plea to the forum a while ago, I chose a creative zen xtra 40GB and I am very pleased indeed with it.
OK so the bundled software is complete toss but you don't need to use it anyway.

One thing that worried me before I bought the player was that I wouldn't have the time to sit down and rip all my hundreds of CD's to the device. I found that the sneakiest, least hassle way to do this was to bring a handful of CD's into work with me each day and 'rip while I worked'.
I use MS Media Player to rip and find the album info and then just lift all the music folders from my laptop and dump them on my zen (transfer speed around 1 song per second).

I like the big capacity of the zen, it enables me to rip at the highest quality (192kbits/s WMA) and not worry about using too much space. Ipods are lovely but as I understand it they are limited to MP3 format, zen's can use any format that I have come across.
 
Oleron said:

I like the big capacity of the zen, it enables me to rip at the highest quality (192kbits/s WMA) and not worry about using too much space.
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Beginner! My spoken word cds/tapes are ripped at 64k mono, and 40 gig still isn't enough.
 
For one person speaking, 32K is more than adequate for me. It's all according to what's adequate for you.

My experience with portable players in cars is mixed, but mostly bad. In my ancient pickup, one MP3 player that worked well was basically beaten to death. The third time I put it back together with krazy glue, there was too much itty bitty stuff broken. That was the last 'expensive' thing I will ever put in a vehicle that's not hard-mounted. Seriously, just buy the car stereo with an MP3 player built into it. You'll take one sharp turn, and your expensive portable gizmo will take a dive. The el-cheapo portable player I replaced it with has to be turned on and started and set to 'random' each time I start the truck. It's got one of those casette adapters. I don't feel like putting a $200 MP3 player (plus bonus stereo installation expense to cut steel to fit a modern profile radio) into a truck where it will be more than 10% of the value of the vehicle. Half the value is in the tires already.
 
MP3 MONSTER PLAYER

http://www.addonics.com/products/mfr/aemfr842d.asp

Here's a portable stand-alone toy that'll burn flash media (i.e. camera shots) to CDR/DVDR without a computer connected, show the pictures on PAL or NTSC TV sets, play DVDs (stand-alone), and play MP3s (stand-alone) presumably also off a DVD.

4.5GB is a lot of MP3s.

The only downside to it is it isn't optionally USB powered, like their other devices.
 
Goshawk, first, for loading files onto your DJ, use the DJ Explorer software that came with it, not the Jukebox software. The DJ Explorer lets you drag and drop or copy and paste the files onto your DJ which is displayed as a drive on your computer. Also, note that there is a difference between the file name for the track and the "tag". All mp3 files contain additional attribute data known as a tag. This tag contains the track title, artist, album name, etc. plus the all-important track number tag. The track number tag must be filled in for the DJ to play albums in the correct track order. You can edit tag information in within the DJ Explorer or you can download this bit of freeware: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

You might also want to peruse this message board for a lot of helpful information about the Dell DJ: http://www.delldjsite.com/
Feel free to PM me if you want more help.

Roger, for classical music, I would suggest entering the composer's name in the Artist tag, the name of the piece as the Album name, and of course the track numbers as appropriate. Remember that mp3 players change the way you think of "albums" as a unit. Say you have a CD with two symphonies on it by two different composers. This can become two "albums" once ripped into digital files. There is no need to retain the original CD structure. Each symphony can be its own album. That will certainly make it easier to search for a particular piece of music within the library.

Most mp3 tag editors enable you to make changes to artist or album to multiple tracks en masse. You don't have to change them one by one.
 
CFLarsen said:
"spoken word collection" is...? Books?
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Yes. But read by someone else, for people who can't read for some reason .

(e.g. because they're driving or hard-of-seeing*, I'm not suggesting Thumbo is illiterate)


*Is that actually a phrase?
 
I don't see why not, even if he's just now coined it.

There are other people who are hard-of-thinking, but they don't spend much time on this forum.
 
Psi Baba said:


Roger, for classical music, I would suggest entering the composer's name in the Artist tag, the name of the piece as the Album name, and of course the track numbers as appropriate. Remember that mp3 players change the way you think of "albums" as a unit. Say you have a CD with two symphonies on it by two different composers. This can become two "albums" once ripped into digital files. There is no need to retain the original CD structure. Each symphony can be its own album. That will certainly make it easier to search for a particular piece of music within the library.
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Thanks, I hadn't thought about splitting the CD up, but it's obvious now that you've said it. However, I'm not sure I really want to spend that much time on this. Maybe I'll give the technology some time to mature. Or maybe I'll write my own ripping software. Couldn't take longer than doing this by hand for hundreds of CDs, could it?
 
I bought a Rio MP3 player that has 1.5 gigabyte memory. I like it a lot. It cost about $150.

One downside to it. It seems to have a glitch that causes it to not want to come all the way on half the time. I can hear it clicking and clicking and clicking and the RIO screen is there, but it never quite powers all the way up. Then I have to turn it off and back on. Sometimes several times.

This may be a defect particular just to my player. I really should go and get it replaced.

The software that came with it is very user friendly.

1.5 gigs is a heck of a lot of memory. I don't know what anyone would do with an iPods 20 or 30 gigs. Seems like you would be spending half your time surfing through the menus and probably would never listen to more than a gig or two.
 
I've got both a Creative Nomad IIc (128 kb internal and a Smartmedia slot) and a Creative Nomad Jukebox. Both are a bit long in the tooth now but still work fine.

The IIc is good for walking etc. as it is solid state. Since it uses SmartMedia, I'm stuck with 128 + 128 card.

The Nomad is 6 gig and is a bulkier unit then the Zen while having less capacity. I'm thinking of replacing it with a 40gig Zen, although I can upgrade the hard drive in the one I have.

Anyway, for anyone with a Creative Labs unit, try out Notmad from RedChair http://www.redchairsoftware.com/

Much better than the software that comes with the units in that it doesn't crash every second use.
 
CFLarsen said:
"spoken word collection" is...? Books?
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Books, drama, radio shows, stand-up comedy, speeches.

I've been collecting them on tape and CD for a while.
 
richardm said:
Yes. But read by someone else, for people who can't read for some reason .

(e.g. because they're driving or hard-of-seeing*, I'm not suggesting Thumbo is illiterate)


*Is that actually a phrase?
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For driving, certainly, but also when doing those boring jobs which don't take all my attention - yard work, house work, work work - that sort of stuff.

<topic_drift> For any other spoken word addicts out there, I recommend wireless headphones. I can wander the house and garden freely listening to my favorites. Makes an otherwise tedious job fun. (Hmmm - I'm starting to sound like Mary Poppins.)
 
Luke T. said:

1.5 gigs is a heck of a lot of memory. I don't know what anyone would do with an iPods 20 or 30 gigs. Seems like you would be spending half your time surfing through the menus and probably would never listen to more than a gig or two.
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Depends how you work it. I had a smaller player for a while, and used to download the stuff I wanted to listen to on a trip before that trip. These days I just keep nearly everything on the player, which saves having to remember to download to it.

At a rough calculation, my 40 gig Zen has about seven months worth of commute listening on it before it repeats.
 
Probably a little late for Christmas but I have to recommend the Bang & Olufsen Beoplayer 2.

It is a beautiful, stylish piece of kit that runs music with SD flash cards. Battery life is excellent and sound quality is amazing (the headphones that come packaged with it usually run £80 and I've heard tell of iPod owners replacing their headphones with these).

For a look at the thing, check here: http://www.bang-olufsen.com/sw694.asp

On the down side, it's kind of pricey.

Andy/
 
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