My Quest for the perfect replacement MP3 player...
by Rick D
01Dec2005:I bought a Pocket PC this summer. An IPAQ from HP refurbished store. "Call For Help" Leo and guest showed how it could play converted movies. It plays MP3s. It plays games. Databases, spreadsheets, Web Browser, 802.11b and bluetooth. There is no point in buying a seperate MP3 player(though I have the Memorex just for songs when I need to use the palm pda instead). This one is great. So the story ends.
16Aug2006:Well, not quite. The Pda is great. Music, movies, files, ToDos, calendar, IR remote control just about anything. Quite a bit more work to use than the palm PDA. But, almost 1500 pictures on a 1 gig sd card!. Bluetooth works for cards and files. Trying to make a mono headphone work. 802.11b works as long as encryption is off. With wep on, I get about 30 min. then its just a lot of trouble. Working on this.
My first and second portable audio players were standard cd players(I am skipping the entire cassette era). They were fine. I could take my audio with me, play what I wanted, not the stuff on the radio. Though I did find 2 stations I liked...classic and oldies(oldies died away leaving "BOB" behind so it left nothing). I still prefer taking what I liked. My new truck has a radio/cd player, but standard audio, not even cassette. And no stereo input jack. I can still expect a usb jack for thumb drives can't I? I know such things exist as a retro fit.
Back in 2003, I did buy a solid state MP3 player. A MDM-H2/USB from IO Data, 64 megs of internal ram, and a slot for up to 64 megs of mmc card. It plays great. light weight, small, no skipping. And for playing my music CDs, I can get about 4-6 hours on it. Yes, usually at a 32K sample, fine for a player using tiny ear buds, outside in a noisy environment. Where 192K just wastes space with quality that won't be heard. I stopped using my audio cd players this was so great. And at less than $100, a great price too.
Then May 2005 arrives. I get high speed cable internet. I find out that the Screen Savers gang is getting together for a weekly net cast(I don't like the term pod cast and many other complain about it as well). I can download the files and play them as I run around doing work and errands. Add to that Leo Laportes 6 hours of weekend radio shows, Kevin Rose, Dan Huard, Alex Albrecht, and Yoshi DeHerras' other audio casts that can be from tens of minutes to several hours long. So the file sizes can be a 10 megs to several hundred megs. The largest my player can hold is about 62.5 megs. I don't want to have to spend the time recoding them to crappy bitrates or splitting them up. If I want to spend the time, I'll listen to them instead. So I need a new MP3 player that will have more memory and/or take a bigger card. Though I prefer to stick with mmc, sd, or compact flash as those are what I use now.
When you are playing music, just about anything that sounds good will work. This is bacause you are dealing with small files, on average 5 minutes in length. So skipping and searching are not difficult. This is very different when playing large radio net casts. When the player is turned off, then turned on, it must start playing from the point when it was stopped. I call this resume. It must also have the ability of moving forwards or backwards fast. Called searching. Again, in a small music file, one you've heard many times, just playing it again or skipping to the next song/track is not a problem. Having to re-listen to a 1 hour net cast you were already 45 minutes into is not fun at all. Fast searching to that point is better than nothing at all, as long as it only takes a few seconds, but I still have to remember where I left off. Doing errands, I may be playing only ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Yes. I was spoiled by the IO Data player, apparently with a unique team of developers with forthought.
So, my search for another solid state player brought me to a Memorex MMP3642A MP3/WMA I got on sale. Nice and small with an LCD display. Only 64 megs internal memory, but would take up to 512 megs sd or mmc. It loses a point on my rating because you have to remove the battery to insert/remove the card. It gains a point because it does have fast forward and reverse search, but it looses 5 points because when restarted, it begins the file /track at the beginning. It is slighty annoying to have to specially format the player memories. But only once normally. While there is a firmware upgrade feature, being discontinued means this probably won't get fixed. I did buy a 256 meg mmc card. I tried in in the IO Data player just to be sure, and it didn't work. So it goes into the Memorex. And this player will be used for the normal music playing CDs I own I have ripped occasions only. I did not find a manual or hint of no resume feature on the net.
I next bought a Panasonic MP3 CD player(SL-CT520) form a local store. This would be great. A whole 640 megs or so at one time. This is one extremely cool cd player. Extremely thin and light weight using 2 AAA batteries. Bundled with an LCD remote control! and an external 2 AA battery pack for far more playing time. As in about 2 days. Played great. Resumed when I turned it off then on. But no fast searching when playing MP3! Arghhhh!!!! Only in regular CD mode. What a stupid thing to do! Forty five minutes into a 60 minute program. Stop for an errand. Hit wrong button(didn't engage hold), and skip to next track. Have to go back and find out where I was. Errand now takes twice as long. And I realize another reason why fast search is required...so you can replay a portion and try to understand they said. This player was hard to return to the store. But I had to. If I was going to spend money on another player, cd or solid state, it would have to meet my needs.
A short side trip...I haven't tried hard drive based players yet. I want light weight and and long battery life. I don't want a specialized piece of hardware that requires specialized software to get copies of songs(or rather buy again!) from CDs I own or get public accessable net casts on to it.
I then bought another cd player, an RCA RP2525. I wasn't planning to. I wanted to get a list of models available, then seach the net for manuals to see if it stated the features I wanted. But it was on sale. It had a useless car cassette adapter which rarely works. A different model comes with a remote control-a better choice. I did find the manual online, but it was unclear whether it had resume. It looked as if fast search would work. And it did state that an option was to restart at the current track. Apparently, the default is to restart the cd over! This goes back too.
I will learn. I will check out only those that specify fast search and resume in a manual/spec sheet online. Now I have to get that list of models in my price range. I will get both a solid state player and a cd player. One great for portability, the other great for archived cds, larger collections, and trips.
======