Mp3 Players

[sheepdog 10]

Boy for something as common and simple seeming, these dang little music players are the very devil to figure out how to use. I bought myself one for Christmas. Figured it would be a lot easier than dealing with a CD player and all my cd's in the car on the long drive to California this year for our vacation. The old man is country, I'm oldies Rock and Roll, so listening to the radio is out of the question. So, I figured it would be easy to transfer my cd's to the player right? Yea, sure. I got one cd transfered, took it out and put another one in the computer and then did 2 more. But when I listened to my player, it had the same cd recorded 4 times! I still haven't figured out how that happened. I erased it all and tried again, and the same thing happened. Of course I was smart enough to only try 2 cd's the next time. I fought with the stupid thing till the world looked level, and finally gave up on it for a few days. It's supposed to be able to transfer directly from the cd's, but I sure couldn't get it too. So after thinking about it for a few days, I decided to put all the cd's on the hard drive of the computer and then to the player. I think I finally got it figured out, it seemed to work if they got copied off the hard drive. So, right now I have about 10 cd's on it. Not sure how many songs it will hold. I have a lot more cd's but they aren't very well organised, and I have made multiple copies of them so I have to go threw them first and then try to remember if I have that one yet or not. All very annoying. And I'm almost afraid to try to put more on it, I'm afraid I'll screw up and then have to start over again. But I really do like the player. Fits real nice in my pocket, not much bigger than a ciggerette lighter. I did buy a different set of head phones for it, the one's that came with it hurt my ears, they were too big and hard as little rocks.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I'm glad you got your problems resolved (or so I think?) with the system! Getting new headphones is usually recommended just because different people have different listening styles -- for example, headphones I like my friends may not, and the ones they like I may not.Regarding how many songs it can fit, it really depends on the quality of the song rips and how much storage the MP3 player has. Most of my songs are around 3 MB's and I use an 8GB iPod Touch (which has about 6.5 usable) which essentially means I can hold over 2,000 songs before it's full. There are devices with significantly more memory than that though!

[k_nitin_r 8]

Sheepdog,What you have is an upscale-MP3-CD hybrid player. Not too many players include both a CD player and an MP3 player and also toss in an internal storage medium. It is usually just a CD player with a USB port and a slot of memory cards, or just an MP3 player with internal memory that can plug into the USB port of a computer. There is a (Chinese) firm that still makes cassette tape players with a slot for USB and memory cards (looks very vintage), and another firm that makes CD players that look like they could be from the yester-years.I can't imagine why you would have the same CD recorded four times, when you changed the CDs.... unless you have a four-CD changer and you had the first disc still inserted. It would have been really tragic if your second try would have been with four CDs too. If you were to physically remove the first disc from the player, there would be no way for it to make another copy of the first disc. There is a chance that the player is buggy and the folks who created it only tested it with one disc inserted at a time.Either way, it is always easiest to just copy MP3 files to the MP3 players because it makes it so much more intuitive using a computer interface that you have been using time and again, with a keyboard to edit the media information metadata and a mouse to drag and drop. Drag and drop isn't as simple as it should be - multiple windows are rarely visible at the same time unless you have a multi desktop setup with two or more monitors. They ought to figure out something easier.Back in the days of Windows 3.1, most apps were designed to not take up all of the screen space though it was just 640x480 and that seemed fair enough for doing the drag-drop thing. Now, even with 1024x768 and 1366x768, applications tend to take up all of the desktop area and prefer to be maximized.

[sheepdog 10]

No, my mp3 player doesn't have the cd player too.But it sounds like I can get quite a few more songs on it, if I ever get brave enough to try and get my cd's organized. I have to say, I really love that little booger. SO much better than a cd player. With a cd player, every time you hit a bump in the road it skips. I had to lay my old one on my lap to keep it from skipping all the time, and then every time I moved it would fall. And then there is battery life. I would of eaten up 4 sets of batteries on the trip out there with the cd player. ( I do use the rechargable AA bateries in the cd play) The mp3 uses one AAA. I put one battery in it when I got it, did all the programing, listened to it quite a bit here before we left on our trip, then listened to it all the way out there, some while there and we were on our way home before the first battery wore out. I thought that was pretty fantastic. So....now I'm considering looking for a speaker only that I can plug the little thing into so I can use it at the kennel without headphones. I don't even know if they actually make such a thing. I suppose they do, I've seen a few things that might be what I was wanting, but most seemed like they were battery powered, and I'd like to have something I could just plug in.

[k_nitin_r 8]

You get to list to music all the way on a single AAA battery? I'm guessing the trip must have lasted about three hours at least. That is quite remarkable! I have a cheap Android tablet that I got for giggles and the battery on it lasts for just over an hour while it is being used. The iPhone doesn't last a whole day either, though I have to mention that when I leave some music playing and turn off the screen, it can play for well over eight hours with less than half the battery being used. MacBooks are quite popular for being able to run for extended hours on battery, so I expected no less from Apple. I sometimes wonder if Lenovo will bring the all-day computing models that the Thinkpad was known for with laptops running for about twelve or fourteen hours on a single charge. With one of those, stopping at a power outlet in an airport for a quick charge would be a thing of the past with everybody being able to go a couple of days because they don't leave their computers running all the time.BTW, for your MP3 player, you could get a battery-powered speaker. Those can be expensive for the ones that sound good, but if you just want to try it out, there are some rather cheap ones that should cost you no more than $8 and can be charged through USB while providing the ability to play MP3s through its own microSD slot. The sound quality was pretty bad on the one I tried, but it was much louder than my old laptop's speaker so it served its purpose when I needed it.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

No, my mp3 player doesn't have the cd player too.But it sounds like I can get quite a few more songs on it, if I ever get brave enough to try and get my cd's organized. I have to say, I really love that little booger. SO much better than a cd player. With a cd player, every time you hit a bump in the road it skips. I had to lay my old one on my lap to keep it from skipping all the time, and then every time I moved it would fall. And then there is battery life. I would of eaten up 4 sets of batteries on the trip out there with the cd player. ( I do use the rechargable AA bateries in the cd play) The mp3 uses one AAA. I put one battery in it when I got it, did all the programing, listened to it quite a bit here before we left on our trip, then listened to it all the way out there, some while there and we were on our way home before the first battery wore out. I thought that was pretty fantastic.

So....now I'm considering looking for a speaker only that I can plug the little thing into so I can use it at the kennel without headphones. I don't even know if they actually make such a thing. I suppose they do, I've seen a few things that might be what I was wanting, but most seemed like they were battery powered, and I'd like to have something I could just plug in.

There are actually a lot of different speakers that can be used. K's idea of a battery powered one is great (it'd be the same type as you would use in a computer), but there are smaller non-powered ones as well. Basically anything with a headphone jack *should* work.

As you get more comfortable with the MP3 player, making a move to another more powerful one may be in order too. I carry an iPod touch everywhere I go. Off a 1 hour battery charge it will play ~50 hours worth of music before needing to be charged again. Even on very long trips, this isn't an issue. And with a car charger it's even better.