mp3 player?

[Talas]

Looking to buy one to go jogging. I am currently using a Mini-Disc, but need to get a special carrying case to prevent it from skipping.

Instead, I was just thinking of buying an mp3 player. Anyone have any recommendations? I saw a Nike 128 RAM-based mp3 player for sale for about $150.

Thanks :)

[Eomer]

Depends what you want. Do you want a hard drived based one? Or a solid-state memory one? Not sure how good an Ipod or similar play is for jogging, but my Archos 20gb is useless for it. It only has a 2 mb cache and a really shitty HD that skips easily, so the one time I took it running it was useless. Killed the batteries incredibly fast as well, because it kept spinning up and spinning down.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, don't buy Creative. I bought a Nomad and the fuckers refuse to release drivers that will let it work in XP. I can no longer load music onto it because it only works in Win98 or earlier. I tried various work arounds I found on the net, but none worked. Can anyone say forced upgrade?

[Talas]

Probably a memory-based one. I think if I were to get something that is HD or CD based, I might as well stick to my MD player.

[Kaxmax]

Probably more than you're looking to spend, but I have a 10gig Ipod and absolutely love it. It holds an assload of songs, and there are tons of accessory type stuff. For instance, I have a holder that straps around my bicep for jogging. I've never had any kind of problem with skipping, and it's very compact.

I also had a solid state Rio at one time, and liked it, but it didn't hold enough songs for me (only 64 mb). Also, it went through batteries like a knife through butter.

[Vinen]

Did a quick search for you Talas on buy.com

http://www.buy.com/retail/computers/product.asp?sku=10316304&loc=440 is a pretty decent one for under $100.

[Talas]

Wow, those Ipods are really nice!

[Eomer]

Yeah they are. It all depends what you want to spend. Personally I wouldn't buy a memory based one again simply because it's a pain to load music on it when you want to change CD's. The extra price to get a quality HD one is worth it IMO. From what I have heard and read, none of the better HD based ones will skip, since they have 10-20mb caches on them, at least.

However, some might agree with the logic of this comic!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2003-05-28&res=l

[Talas]

hahaha, nice

[Andriana Duskrose]

I'd suggest just buying a discman with anti-shock that can read CD-R's with MP3's on them, and use personalized mix CD's.

[Dharrk]

Originally posted by Andriana Duskrose
I'd suggest just buying a discman with anti-shock that can read CD-R's with MP3's on them, and use personalized mix CD's.

I agree

[Buazag Bonesteel]

Ditto....I have a Riovolt that pretty much owned until I managed to crack the lcd display. Now I can only put a disc in and hit play.....cant see any of the nifty functions it has anymore =/

[Eomer]

Yeah, what Andriana said is a good idea as well. That's basically what my car stereo is, and I love it. Nice not to worry about CD's being stolen out of my car.

[Vinen]

Originally posted by Eomer
Yeah, what Andriana said is a good idea as well. That's basically what my car stereo is, and I love it. Nice not to worry about CD's being stolen out of my car.

How much those cost Eomer. The ones for cars. Im looking at buying a New CD player for mine and was thinking of getting one that supports MP3's.

[Dharrk]

200ish, they really aren't more expensive than the non-mp3 supported ones, just have to find one with the feature...

[Talas]

The only problem with the anti-shock things is that after running for a while, it will just skip out and not settle until you are back at a walking pace or completely stop. Well, most skip protection.

My mini-disc has 40sec skip protection which seemed to be great, until about the 2nd minute. Then I had to rig my MD to keep it suspended while I run on a treadmill, which I obviously can't do if I actually GO running, hehe.

If there is that much cache memory, then I shouldn't have a problem, but I'm not sure about those CD-R players??

or am I wrong?

[Eomer]

My original one was about $300 CDN, but I ended up swapping it out for the next one up the line because it had super shitty sound quality. The one I have now was $450, and the sound quality on MP3's is okay, but still not great. Dunno why it's so hard to make a decent MP3 player. I would not recommend getting a JVC, which is what I have.

[Exitilus]

I just bought myself a portable setup ..

-250 for an oldish 5gb ipod (canadian dollars - and came with cases, remote, fm transmitter, and whatever else)

-etymotic research 4p earphones - good stuff, but useless for jogging. (microphonic cabling)

The ipod is grand - even one with a small drive like this - lasts just under 10 hours on a full charge, which charges by firewire in an hour and change .. have around 70 albums on it, all encoded in 192. Backlite screen, amazing interface and firmware, tiny tiny thing, and there are tons of cool cases and whatnot for it.

There is no way I could go back to a CD based player - the convenience of a hard-drive based setup is addictive. This year my major summer purchase was a computer - next year, I think I'll buy whatever the newest ipod generation is - these things are great, and get better every generation. (played around with a friend's 3rd gen ipod - good stuff)

-Exit

edit: also, for reference, ipods have 32 mb of memory, and never ever skip or chug. However, the extra memory makes their battery life a little lower than that of their competitors who are more often in the 10-15mb range.

edit2: the FM transmitter allows you to transmit on an empty FM band, and tune into it with your car stereo - I haven't tried it yet honestly, I don't own a car, but I've heard good things about it.