MP3 questions...

[Scary Mc]

I would like to purchase some sort of MP3 player for the bike, but the dial up connection in my area is painfully slow and it would take hours for me to download a single song. Is it possible to put the CDs that I currently own onto an MP3? If so, how? I know nothing about this technology and need some advice.
What is a good player and how much should it cost?

Thanks- Scary

[switchback]

Well first I have to say that a player to mount on the bike may be hard to find. There are several walkman type varieties out there that can cownload a bunch of music and you do not need to fool with CD players and there are others that can play MP3s off of CD as well as standard CDs. As for which one is the best I can not help but they range in price from about $70 to $200. Search the internet on sites like Buy.com and outpost.com.

To decode CDs to MP3s you need software. I use an old piece of trial software but there are numerous packages availiable. with different features. Most are bundled with CD writer software but there are several stand alone also. The process is very simple with old CDs. You just put your CD in and the software does the rest.

Hope this helps.

[switchback]

Oh yeah, the real jukebox from real.com is free software that can decode MP3s for you.

[Scary Mc]

What type of player is preferable, one with expandable and switchable memory cards, or a player with a built in hard drive that can store up to 300 hours of music on it's own?
I went to Best Buy and became even more confused with all of the different options and players...

Eric, I am keeping your player in mind, but I want to explore all of the options first.

Thanks- Scary

[Road Dog]

like this one:

http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=585164

It should answer all your questions, except which mp3 player to buy. IMHO it comes down to how fast you want to load and how long you want to listen. IE the IPod uses a firewire interface and is fast as lightning to load. But the Archos units have as much or more storage but only use the USB interface from common PCs, it is very slow. I think most folks would agree for any lengthy trip you'll want the internal hard drive units because of the amount of songs they can store.

[Scary Mc]

Eric- I'm sorry but I'm not sure what your saying... That the hard drive units are difficult to use, or just that they are difficult to use compared to the iPod?
I have a CD burner as a component in my home audio system, can I convert my CDs to MP3s with it? Or am I completely missing the point? Most likely case.

Thanks again- Scary

[switchback]

Scary,

You can make MP3s with your system and since you have a CDRW you may want to buy a MP3 player that can play MP3s from CD. It is not hard at all you just need to get some software to do the decoding. The software will read your CDs and save the songs as MP3s on your hard drive. A CDRW will hold about 20 hours of music in MP3 format so I would write the MP3s to CD after you have made a bunch. Download the Real Jukebox from Real.com and start playing. There are instructions in the help section. The time spent recording will give you time to think about the right player.

David

[Road Dog]

My point was, after you read up on the topic, making the mp3s isn't a problem, plenty of ways to do that and plenty of ways to store them on the home system.

Getting them on the bike in a useable form was the issue I addressed. Some mention IPod as a mp3 player which is new to market but has excellent features. In fact it's biggest feature is it's ability to be loaded using the Firewire interface. It allows you to push megabytes of data on to the internal 5gb drive in minutes. So far it can only be used with an Apple PC.

Conversely the "other" hard drive based players that you also can use on the bike all come with only the USB interface. Even the one with the 20gb hard drive is limited to the slow USB load speed. You can load them from any PC type but it takes forever to load 5gb. So pick your poison, the hard drive units are the way to go but you have to choose between fast loading or slow loading, if you have an Apple its either one, if not you're stuck with slow. Unless you have a friend with an Apple system.

[Scary Mc]

Thanks for everybodys help with my questions. I had no idea what I was wanting, and I still don't, but your advice will help me to make a more informed decision.

How slow is slow when talking about USB downloads, what is the time frame for downloading and hours worth of music from a CD to the MP3 formatted player? I would assume that my PC has alot to do with this, I have a notebook with a Pentium II, and gobs of RAM (I forget how much).

Thanks- Scary

[Road Dog]

The Ipod was tested using 333 songs (1.35gb) it loaded the songs on to the disk in 3 min 5 sec using the latest operating system on an old 450meg Power Mac system. I can't find the info from a comparable test on a Windows system but I remember theirs being in the hours per gb range. As soon as I find that article I'll post the info.

[Hoppy]

The iPod is the way to go if you have the $$$ and don't need it for other things.

I have a Nomad IIMG w/ 196M of ram. Holds about 190 songs on it (at 32kb/sec WMA format -- sounds great). And I run them through custom earplugs that Bob Weiss made. I made a simple belt clip for it using a cell phone holder that I picked up from Fry's electronics.

I never leave home on trips out of the City (SF) w/o it. I love it.

[stevenknapp]

Scary,

Let me throw in some basics here. Might help, you may be insulted. I'm going for helpful.

"MP3" is an digital audio format. Not physical, like Beta or VHS, but more a file format.

You can convert to-from MP3 using software. I'm not sure what all is out there, but I know there is a pretty good spread. So yes, you can take your CDs and convert the audio on them into MP3 format. It's legal even.

To the best of my knowledge this conversion can only be done via PC. I've not looked at the audio component CD recorders much but I somewhat doubt they offer the feature. Not sure. IMHO they cost more than a CD-RW drive for your PC and are more limiting. But that's another rant.

MP3 files can be of different qualities. The lower quality, the smaller the MP3 file. Usually you'll see XXXk, a bitrate. Simply put this is how much data per-second you've recorded. Higher is better, more detailed. 32k is quite low I'm told, I've ripped (slang for converted) at 64k and been happy enough for the gym and the bike I'm guessing. Others prefer higher.. YMMV.

The *key* from this is that the quality affects the file size. You'll see where that fits in later.

Now you've got these files. You want to play them. You look at portable players. You see there are all sorts of players. A key feature is how they store the files, this is the Beta vs VHS issue.

These are the ones I know of.

On a CD: You burn the MP3s on a CD-R or CD-RW using your PC. This gizmo which looks like a normal discman plays either normal CDs, or can read and play your MP3s. CD's store about 700MB of data and are cheap. You can carry as many as you can. The units have buffers to help make them skip proof BUT a long very bumpy road might still skip. CDs are pretty durable. Copying your MP3s to a CD is limited by the speed of your CD-R drive. Probably takes a few minutes per CD.

On a hard disk: Archos, iPod, others... The device has a disk, 6GB, 20GB..whatever the spec is per device. You can't swap the disk, but the idea is that it's big enough to hold all your music at once. At this point I'd look into the devices user interface, after all with that much music you'll need to find it. :): Copying your MP3 files to the device is limited by how the disk connects to your PC. USB is more common, your PC probably has it, but is slower. Firewire (ala iPod) is faster, but fewer PCs have it. You may need an expansion card. Oh, and the iPod was a mac only device, you may what to check out the PC software before buying. Skipping? Probably not an issue, the drives are pretty robust. But if you do get it to crash the drive is toast and would need to be swapped out.

In "flash" memory: The key here is solid state. No moving parts. Never as dense as the other media. These units when I looked were quite small as well. 100% skipproof. Some players have internal memory, some not. Some with internal memory don't allow for an expansion card, others do. If you get an expandable unit you can swap memory cards like you swap CDs. The key here is that memory cards are more expensive. Maybe your digicam has resulted in you having a small collection of these already? Great! If not it can add up. Copy speed is limited by the type of memory and how you connect to it..it can vary quite a bit. There are a handful of memory card standards.

SO, which one? Well depends.

How much storage do you need? Depends on how high of quality you need/want. Depends on how much music you want to store per trip.

Some examples:

A friend has a Archos, he has his whole CD collection on the thing encoded at a higher quality setting. Anywhere he goes he can pick any music he likes, anytime. He uses it walking, in the car, at home. It's sorta cool.

Another friend has a CD based MP3 player. He has a handful of CDs that offer him hours of music, more than enough for him. He still needs to swap CDs every handful of hours. He can also listen to regular CDs should he want to borrow something from a friend.

I bought my wife a solid-state unit to take to the Gym. She works out for an hour or two. It can store about three hours of 64k music. More than enough at good enough quality. Once and awhile she jacks it into the PC and downloads a new playlist. It was pretty cheap ($130 w/96MB), someday I may reuse the memory card ($50-64MB) and is very small (she wears it on her wrist).

[Scary Mc]

Thanks for the in depth info guys!

I have decided to wait to buy a player until I find out more about the SDMI compliancy crap. I want to buy the Archos Jukebox, but Archos is not SDMI compliant. I have been reading (in several different places) that several music companys (Sony for example) will soon start watermarking their MP3 files and that if your player is not SDMI compliant the music files will not load properly. I don't want to buy a player only to find out that I can't download the music I want in six monthes...

SDMI is a group of big shots, Sony, etc..., that have gotten together to try and regulate a music system that they tried to get outlawed (unsuccesfully), but since that didn't work they will just control the little guys with Byzantine rules and regulations.
At least this is my basic understanding of the situation.

Am I completely off base, or is there any truth this?

Many thanks -Scary

[Guzz]

SDMI basicly sucks (personal opinion).

All it is, is a way of stoping people from sharing music. Example: you have your MP3 portable player, a friend likes a song you have on it, you copy it onto his computer, he puts it on his player. It won't play because of the SDMI (your MP3 has been signed to only play on your player).

So, personally, I would try to stay away from SDMI compliant devices.

As for creating you own MP3's from your personal CD collection. I highly recommend Audio Grabber. It is relatively simple to use and allows one to use external encoders.

Basic use: Put in your audio cd in your computer, start Audio Grabber, tell it to get the song titles (need internet access), click the Grab! button, go for a quick motorcycle ride to the corner for beer, find the MP3's on your hard drive, play the music or copy to your portable player.

As for Hard drive players (the good ones allow you to copy other files to it, like programs, documents, etc). They allow for HOURS of music to be played. One thing to look for (for use on a bike) is to have a huge memory buffer to stop skipping (yes they still skip when bumped).

The Archos player is still somewhat buggy with it's software. It is somewhat difficult with the playlists, and the random play isn't the best. If you want to read more about it go to FunMP3Players and go to their discussion group and read about the issues they have.

For a nice summary of the hard drive based players, go to HotMP3Gear Comparison. The table of players is huge and a bit hard to read because you have to do alot of horizontal/vertical scrolling.

I am waiting for the Sonic Blue Rio Riot to hit the market. It looks interesting, but I am not sure if it meets all my needs.

[stevenknapp]

Guzzler, check again, the Rio Riot is shipping according to that link you posted.

I agree, the copy protection stuff is crap.