Re: Ask EU: mp3 player

"Siderius Nuncius" <matron.nuncius@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:5mblhtFcn7dmU2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dear chums,

I may be looking for an mp3 player soonish.

If I do get one it will need to carry the contents of well over 700 CDs and
I'd prefer some spare capacity, too. I see that there's now a 160Gb iPod
available, which stores 40,000 songs in 128-Kbps AAC format. I've had a look
around but I'm not really much the wiser about what this means, nor really
about whether the thing is much good or not, and I'd be grateful for the
advice from umrats, whose views I generally both understand and trust. It's
about £220, which I'd be prepared to pay for something good, but it's a lot
to punt on the current state of my knowledge, even after fairly extensive
googling.

I can make an estimate of the duration of The British Standard Song, (it
looks like about 2000 hours of music storage) but the rest floors me a bit,
I'm afraid. Would some kindrat please explain the capacity in sensible
terms like the size of Wales - i.e. how many CDs of classical music (average
duration about 65-70 mins, I guess) will it hold if I want reasonable
quality?

Is it a good product, would you say? Is there still a problem with
durability and batteries, and of so, can anyone recommend a suitable
alternative? (I would probably want to get a thingy to put it on to charge
up and play out loud, so it would need to be compatible with one.) I've
come across a lot of sour remarks about iTunes, but is this really a problem
if I won't be downloading, just putting CDs onto it? And can I use my
lovely Bose headphones with it?

Any other remarks or observations gratefully received.

I think the length of the proverbial piece of string has been quantified; IMO the MP3 (other formats are available) player manuafacturers are doing the usual marketing thing of trying to make you think you get more than you do. Not only is a MByte a mere 1,000,000 bytes (rather than 1024kb), a song is only 3 minutes (how many are that short nowadays) and it assumes an encoding bit rate that will not produce very good quality reproduction.

I have a 20GByte Archos GMini, which I bought based on its small size for such a large capacity, it'll play WMA format as well as MP3, and the fact that it was purely a music player, and didn;t pretend to do anything else I wasn't interested in (e.g. phone, calculator, vidio player, teasmaid). I have some 150 albums on it, and that takes about 12GB of the space. These are all ripped and encoded using the LAME MP3 encoder at a resonable quality level (-v 4 or -v 5 option if you understand that). You can do the sums from there.

I would never buy an iPod because of the proprietary software it insists you use (i.e. iTunes), though I see there are alternatives available. May be worth looking ...

HTH

.

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