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Portable MP3 Player w/ Unix Support?
oobeleck asks: "With my birthday just around the corner and my 8 mile runs needing music, I am thinking of asking for a portable mp3 player. What is the Slashdot community's experience with MP3 portables. What has the most support, what should I stay away from. I have been eye-balling the Diamond Rio 600/800 model. Any opinions on the Rio? I want something that works good with Linux/OpenBSD. Thanks for your help." Ask Slashdot last ran such an article back in April of 2000, I'm sure bigger and better MP3 players have been made since then. Which of today's players would you all recommend?
Looks like Archos has actually revamped this product, because mine doesn't look like the one displayed at the above link. Has anyone used one of these particular models before and can tell me if they've improved on the problem bits that I've mentioned?
If they have, I'd surely recommend this model to anyone who is in the market for an MP3 player.
I know you didn't ask this question, but one thing I've found out is that I like the ones that read off of compact flash a lot better than the one or two that can read off of a CD.
I know they don't hold as much, but when I'm running hard or boxing, it won't ever skip.
(You're probably wondering what a computer nerd is doing running hard and boxing. If you knew where I lived, you'd understand...)
I havn't tested one but an ipod seems to be an obvious candidate
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
Everyone should know at this point that Ogg Vorbis encoded tracks not only sound better, but the take up less disk space as well. I would hope that any "MP3" player that supports Unix also supports Ogg Vorbis.
and various in-dash car units, and after comparing the two, i would recommend a handheld cd-mp3 player.
why? they new models are fast, light, and last upwards of 15 hours on batteries (my rio even spins down the CD while playing to save juice).
CDrs are cheap, and on the average outing 650-700MB of music will last you, even if its encoded at --alt-preset extreme!
semantics are everything!
I dont personally own a portable mp3 player, but am concidering getting one. I have however, had the experience of using a couple of the Diamond Rio players, and really liked them a lot. I was concidering buying the Diamond Rio 600 not too long ago, but didnt have the money at the time. Just my two cents..
You might want to read this story...
5 22 7&mode=thread&tid=98
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/09/123
(I would have posted this 18 seconds ago... but slashdot wouldn't let me.)
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
i use the 32MB rio 300(have 2 16MB flash ..
cards for it). i like it since it's solid
state. record my songs in 96kbps and it works
great. i don't need a large selection, and
there has been rio 300 software for years
on linux. i like it so much i bought 2 more
refurb models from buy.com recently for $60
a pop. my first one has lasted about 3 years
and works almost perfectly still.(a piece of
plastic which holds a screw on the button is
cracked which makes the batteryf all out
pretty easy which is why i got the refurb
models. most reliable player i've ever
had. before that i had a $600 discman which
suffered $400 in damages durin the 2 year
life it had, luckily i had the extended
warranty
seems some like the large selection available
on CD-based and hard disk based units,
i like the rio 300 because its light(the
battery is heavier then the unit), its
durable(Solid state), has supported linux
for years, is cheap, and the batteries
last a long time.
Dont bother with those expensive built in harddrive models just get a cheap Koss mp3 cd players. 650 megs is more than enough and theres plenty of antiskip. I run with one and have no trouble.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Really enjoyed my Nomad 20 gig, until I tried then sold it for an iPod. There are situations where some may be better (say images, video, etc.), but for music I say the iPod wins hands down. Price is still high though
Um ok so your about to get married?
And now you are still asking for presents from your parents?
Must be nice.
This player is one of the best CD-ROM based mp3 players out there. Third generation and it doesn't plug into your computer at all. Just burn mp3s to the CD and then play them. No way you can go wrong with that! It even has 400 second skip protection and the batteries last forever. Here's a link for a review. http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/voltsp250. html
There are 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that do not.
I have a similar question...but I'm looking for a player that works on a 7 mile run. While everyone is busy researching 8 mile MP3 players for that dude, keep an eye-ball open for one for me, too, eh?? Thanks, because I'm too stinking lazy to do it myself.
Would like to heartily second this recommendation. I only have the 6-gig model, but having a portable FAT32 hd is incredibly convenient. If you can mount a Windows drive, you can mount this in your silly Linux thingee.
Durable: I drop this thing at least once a day, it's over a year old and still going. It recharges in ~6 hours for ~6 hours of playback. If you strap the case to your back (as opposed to keeping it on your hip), you won't have as much problem w/ skip, but you will look like a complete dork.
The problem Cliff is experiencing appears to be unintentional jostling of the stop (off) button, so careful how you position it when you run.
[o]_O
Any Archos Jukebox can be used as a USB hard drive. just make sure you have vfat, scsi and the propper usb storage driver (forgot which it is) in your kernel, connect the device and "mount /dev/sda1 [mountpoint]" and voila.
-t vfat
Yes, it's expensive. No there isn't Linux support. But if you've got the cash, you won't find a better player out there. The interface is seamless, the battery life is good, and if you have 20GB of music, it'll accommodate that just fine. Oh yeah, you can also store your contacts & calendar on it just for kicks.
I've had the 5GB version for about 6 months, and am constantly impressed with just how usable it is. I just wish Apple would hurry up & put out a PDA in the same vein....
--Mid
Helps that it runs it internally too...
I don't know why sonic blue stopped making them. I think it was ahead of it's time, like the rest of their stuff.
Still if you can pick one up, you'll be glad you did!
Stop being rebellious and use a normal MP3 player, shithead.
The Creative Nomad/D.A.P. jukebox is really good. I've used a 10GB version and it's easy. The new ones has got 40GB which will store any relatively large CD-collection. There is (unfortunatly) no Linux support. (One of the few times my Windows boot is used.) I really don't see the point in the small ones which use flash or even CD's. With a bigger (bit clumpy, but just hide it in a bag when walking) jukebox you have your CD collection with you everywhere, no need to chose which CD's to take along in the limited CD-compartment. And the Nomad supports surround and EAX effects.
Look a monkey!
I personally use a Panasonic portable CD player that will playback cd's with MP3's on them. With 700 megs per CD, and about 6 hours on two double AA's, it has proved portable and economical. If I want to listen to a new song a friend has on CD, I can do so without having to encode it.
I have been using mkisofs/cdrecord to burn cd's at home while at work for a while now. Just need to call my wife and ask her to put in a new CD. My kids have even got to the point they know when the CD pops out, time to put in another blank.
What, dodn't you mean portable OGG Player?
/., not cnet.com. :-)
(I thought I was reading
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
This thing's supposedly pretty big in Japan.
http://www.mpio.com/violet_html/e_main_jp.asp
The site aint the greatest.
..and I don't like it. I got it back when the default memory it came with was 32 megs. I think it comes with 64 now. 32 is not nearly enough for me to even mow my lawn without hearing a repeat. I could probably buy more memory backpacks for it, but dang, they're expensive!
I also don't like how it drains my battery when it's turned off. I put a fresh battery in, use it for 15 minutes, then next week when I go to mow my lawn again, I have to replace the battery. I've started taking the battery out when I'm not using it.
The headphones that came with it are designed to save battery life, and they aren't designed for quality sound. I might as well be singing to myself.
Oh well, it was a gift. I'm glad I didn't pay money for it... But now that I think about it, my wife was the one who gave it to me, and she used my money to pay for it.. Son of a...
I suggest the iPod. With MacOS, *nix (if you can get XTunes to compile; holy crap what a nightmare), and (soon) Windows support, you can't go wrong. The price is a bit higher than other mp3 players, but you get the added bonus of having a portable hard drive for moving files around, if you need it.
On that note, are there portable players with Vorbis support?
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
I know I'm going against the flow here, but it goes anyway...
I've read this and that about Ogg being better and I want to believe it, but on the few experements I've done. Ogg ends up taking more disk space and significantly longer to encode (using CD-DA XTractor under win2ksp3).
Quality, I can't tell much difference if you force it at the same bit rate. Granted I haven't done a ton of testing, but an mp3 encoded at 160 vs an ogg file encoded at VBR160 just doesn't seem to produce much quality difference. (Maybe my altec lansing speakers aren't good enough?)
I'm sure Ogg will only improve in the future as it's still kind of a baby compared to mp3 but for right now, I'd say Ogg would be at the bottom of most people's feature list. Maybe I'm wrong.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have a CompactFlash based player which I really like. The player itself connects via USB and looks just like a flash-drive or microdrive so it should play well with almost any OS. Also handy for transfering files, etc... plus you can pop the card in your digital camera or, with an adapter, in your laptop, palmtop, etc... Plus, CF keeps getting bigger and cheaper so your player is easy to upgrade. Mine is a MoveMan SP-100 but there are a bunch out there that use CF cards.
I picked up a Diamond Rio 500 when it first became available. I really liked it at first, though the Rio Manager software (for Windows) was so gawd-awful that I bought a replacement (musicmatch). There are fairly mature drivers and software for Linux though I must admit I haven't ever played around with them. I suspect they work with the later models as well.
That said, I am now not so happy with my purchase. The RIO contains only 64 megs of memory which, in your case, would probably be fine. I wanted more. More importantly, though, I have been unimpressed with the 'customer service' for this product. At times (last month), Windows drivers were not available for download. Finding a contact email address was difficult (though this may be resolved now). But more importantly, these devices just aren't very sturdy. Mine is now unusable except when left flat on a table and NOT MOVED. If I pick it up, the thing powers down. My brother and sister both bought one as well and at least one of the two no longer works for them, either.
So what did I get? A Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. 20 gigs of storage and it works very well. I doubt this would be suitable for you, though... no good Linux support yet and it is very much overkill for 3 mile runs. :) In fact, as it is hard-drive based, I wouldn't want to run with it at all. On the other hand, it is great for a one week trip to Mexico (yay!) and for extended bus trips and the like. Heck, I have ALL my CDs ripped to MP3 and stored on the device and I still have over 1/3 of the storage available to me. Firewire and USB, oh my.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I have been hanging on to my Rio 500 under Windows. I will be retiring it and switching to Linux when there is a player that is capable of playing Ogg Vorbis music files.
I looked last month and to the best of my knowledge there are no players that play files other than MP3/WMA/G2 files.
Out of all the things I have purchased and never used, my minidisk player is NOT one of them. I love that thing.
:-) ) and record and listen. I've later converted it to mp3 on my computer and have shared them with my freinds. I've done the same with SSX tricky. SSX tricky has a juke box feature where all the songs are played. The sound quality is fantastic!
They are pretty cheap now, I paid 80 bucks for my Sony MD walkman (bit of an older model now). The tapes are cheap too.
One of my favorite things to do is record video game music off the stereo. I'm able to pop in GTA 3 select Head radio (better variety of weird noises between songs
I recently purchased a really nice microphone for my MD player. Now I can sample sounds all over the place and use them on my computer to make music. Great if your into that sort of thing.
Oh plus the tape adapters for the car work great! I'll never understand why they haven't caught on more with consumers. My friends say the same thing now after they have seen all the uses I've gotten out of it.
... mp3 players that rely on moving parts. If you'll be using this for jogging, you won't get 5 minutes of music out of it (even with skip protection) before the music cuts out.
I have a RioVolt MP3/CD player that i really like, but when i take it mountain biking, i can't hit any really rough stuff for any length of time without it skipping, and it has 2 minutes of anti-skip goodness. Since jogging is alot more jarring than cycling, you'd be SOL if you went for one like that.
Personally, I'm looking at getting one of the tiny players that have a velcro strap. That way i'll get the use of flash memory, which means no skipping when i ride, and since it's so small, it'll be easy to conveniently attach to any appendage for use in the gym. I believe Nike, and a few other companies, sell mp3 players like this.
I wonder, though - is skipping a problem with HD-based players? I might consider an iPod if they're skip-proof.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
..works well...
Just took a run with my irock mp3 player. It is small, simple to use, smart media expansion slot, and it is cheap. I don't care what OS it needs to upload mp3s to the player. I don't see why that really should be an issue. It is more important to me that when I run it stays out of the way and works. Infact I think the software that came with the irock player sux and was most likely written by a 13 year old kid with no UI design experience. I just use wmp, have not tried to used it with linux mabey I am just assuming it is as easy as wmp in linux.
http://www.myirock.com/players/default.asp
.. if you can find a linux download driver.
k .h tml
It has 128mb and is very light and sounds great.
It comes on a neat neck chain with the headphones built in, nice design.
I've yet to try mine with linux and hunt for download tools,
maybe someone knows where I might find one.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/mpio_dm
Get your motor running, head out on the hi-way, looking for adventure, and.. perhaps I'll just hack some perl first..
I have a Rio 600 that I use when working out. It's nice, but with a few quirks. First, I've had it lock up with some songs. It's done it with some MP3 and some WMA. I usually down-sample them before putting them on the player. MusicMatch may be doing something odd to them that causes this. The other thing is the battery. I like the built-in battery since it makes the unit small, but make sure and charge it every day. It'll drain even when off, it seems.
What I really want is a 128MB backpack with an FM tuner. Then it would about the perfect device.
I have a Nex II from Frontier Labs and absolutely love it.
It uses a Compact Flash slot. I've used several brands and they've all worked. It currently has a 128MB card in it, but it could take the IBM Microdrive, 1GB!!
It acts like a removable drive, attached via USB (I actually have some non-MP3 files on it and the player doesn't care). You can drag and drop (or cp) right to the NexII. You can take the NexII to another machine and drag and drop from the Nex to the machine. Lovely.
It's incredibly small and light, just a few ounces plus battery weight. Mine came with a sweet neoprene case to carry it in that has an attached belt clip. Perfect to run or bike with.
You can find it for dirt cheap brand new on eBay, about $80. This company sells them, it's where I got mine and I'll vouch for them. (I'm not associate, just a happy customer.) 128MB compact flash card go for about $40 new on ebay.
You can get "Nexkins" to change the look of the device. Pretty trivial (the machine already looks cool) but there are some neat ones you can find on ebay.
The Nex is really easy to use, and it's just so userfriendly I love it. Moving between tracks, changing the volume, adjusting the built in equalizer (it really works!), using the backlight are all very easy.
I haven't had any problems with mine and I've had it for over a year. Love it, love it, love it. It really is everything you want: light, inexpensive, n*x compatible as removable USB storage, usable, and reliable.
I really don't think you could go wrong with this.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Personally I would stay away from the Diamond Rios. The Rios came with bloated software to transfer music to the player. Better versions of the transfer software have been made thankfully. There is a support area for owners of rios as SonicBlue won't give support for them at http://www.rioworld.org. Currently I have a Rio 500 with 64mb of ram and am thinking about upgrading to the RCA Lyra Jukebox with 20Gb of space. I hope it comes out soon.
I have a zaurus SL5500. I haven't gone jogging with it and it doesn't have any ergonomic controls like a thumb wheel to control volume. That aside, it still is unix friendly. I transfer data by two methods, put the CF card in the CompactFlash adapter and then mount that as drive on my Linux laptop - rip, copy, eject!
At home I have a 802.11b network, plug in the
CF 802.11b card and the Qtopia desktop application will work with the IP address - upload, manage, roam!
Besides that, it has a healthy developer community, Sharp supports open source efforts and it's a PDA! I'm sure that a 256MB storage card is enough for your 8-mile run! Short of a solid state device I'll only invest in an iPod.
I got a Rio 600 a couple years ago, for free thanks to PepsiStuff. In the end, I decided it was worth maybe a little more than what I paid for it, but not a lot. Avoid it if you're paying real money.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I don't know if it works with Linux, but technically speaking it works with a Unix, the best-looking one in fact: OSX.
The ipod is probably the most desirable mp3 player on the marlet, but it is not the cheapest. Have a look at www.apple.com/ipod
You can think of the player as a device. If it's usb, just load the usb-storage module. Next find out what type of file system it has and then mount the player just like you would mount anything else: mount -type vfat /dev/sdaX /mnt/music
Now just copy music files to /mnt/music, unmount and use player.
I have done this from el cheepos to good players and works every time.
I would definitley stay away from the Lyra series from RCA. They are great players but require you to use a MusicMatch or RealPlayer plugin to encode the mp3 into another format which is not playable by computers. This formatting also makes it near impossible (unless there is a hack out there I havent found yet) to pull the files off onto the hard drive an play them. They sound all garbled.
I think if I were to get a player today I would make sure it would store the mp3s AS mp3's and that it used compact flash for the storage media. With USB 2.0 support out now for compact flash these things HAUL when copying to them and are much better than their serial (im so slow I wave to the snails as they pass me) counterparts.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
I have the 64mb version, easily an hour of music, the thing is tiny, weighs next to nothing and has an armband. I use my own ear pieces the supplied 'buds' fall out to easily. I love it.
Downsides
Software is very primitive but just about does what you need. Not upgradeable, need 1 nihm/nicd rechargeable battery, rechargeable alks don't cut it.
Since you're planning on using your player for running/strenous activity, be very sure that whatever you buy is well made and water-resistant!! Sounds obvious, but believe it or not this actually disqualifies at least half of the players out there.
.its VERY small and light, has 128 megs, relatively inexpensive, and I've heard good things about its durability. That might be one for you to consider.
Using myself as an example of why you might want to listen to my advice, I bought an mp3 player with more or less the same goals you did, with the addition of wanting it cheap. So, I ended up buying a jaMp3 from KBGear. One trip to the weight room was all it took. I'm a big guy and I work out hard; the sucker died the first time out from (I believe) getting sweaty.
Anyways, I'm currently looking at the Samsung YEPP-30sh. .
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I use a Zaurus, which has been tested with up to 1GB CF cards. Since I'm ordering a 6 megapixel camera, I'm going to be needing some large (512MB) cards anyway. Nothing like dual purpose. Now if an Ipod could dock up to a digital camera for storage I would really be impressed.
You can store your contacts & calendar on it too.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
I've had a Nomad II for several years and recently upgraged to the IIc with 192Megs of flash on board. Luv it! Over 11 hours of continuous play on a single AA battery.
a live band following me around. the great thing is, they know exactly what kind of music to play, depending on my situation!
waaa waaa waaaaaaa
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I use my PJB100 about 4 hours a day. It has a linux kernel module available (but possibly not maintained) and a very nice open source command line tool (thanks folks!). I've never used my pjb with anything other than linux and haven't had any problems.
;-) Not that the original Compaq guys didn't do a good job, the thing NEVER crashes.
Pro's:
upgradable hard drive - I'm putting a 40 gig in this weekend, up from 20
rechargable lithium ion battery (internal)
battery lasts ~7-8 hours if you don't modify the playlist too often
sounds better than most other mp3 products I've listened too.
linux, mac, and windows clients
the firmware is very very stable
Con's
The company that makes it is almost invisible
The firmware is stable, but also never gets upgrade
(and worse) the firmware is closed source
Its not as pretty as the ipod
It does not have a regular filesystem, which limits its potential use as a usb harddrive
USB isn't as fast as firewire (ipod)
It's expensive
It could be smaller. Jogging? You would need to hold it or have a fanny pack. it's too heavy for a belt.
It comes with a car cigarette adaptor
The table of contents is constrained by a max size, which makes multiple playlists impossible when you've got 20 gigs worth of songs.
All in all, I love my pjb100. I use it almost every single day on the bus and at work and it boosts the quality of life much more than any other gadget I can think of. Still, I wish the firmware was OS so that somebody smarter than me could add features
You can purchase it at http://www.mp3factorydirect.com
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
You forgot the best thing with compact flash! You *don't* need to connect the player to your computer! No special support, no nothing. These cards are essentially IDE disks in disguise. Just find yourself an adapter (costs $10) and mount it as an IDE drive! Or a PCMCIA adapter for perhaps $20. Or a dedicated Firewire (or USB2) drive for perhaps $50. I just love the technology ..!
Afair there is iPod software for Linux!
i have a rio 500 (usb, 64MB+64MB) which runs fine under linux (not under xp). the rioo500 doesn't seem to be produced any longer, so you should be able to get a cheap used device on ebay :) but i would go for one of the small HD based systems, perhaps that mac one, cause there is really a large difference between MB and GB storage size.
Does anyone know if there is any mp3 player, either a cd player that plays cdrs or a dedicated model with hard-drive or flash that plays, or can be firmware-flashed to play .flacs ?
It's not really that I am an "lossless is best" fascist, but I have the majority of my music in flac, and converting it to mp3 every time to fill up the player would be a big waste of time...
graspee
Go with the iPod! It'll cost you a small sum more but it's worth it. Very very neat design. Those controls are way better than anything else right now. You mount it over firewire so the access time is very fast too (after all, that's why you want an MP3 player instead of an MD in the first place, isn't it)... Yes, and it works good with Linux.
about 8 months ago i bought a NAPA mp3cd player (model dav311).
my friend reccomended it as a great deal for the money ($120CDN). it SEEMED good for the first little while, but overall, i am upset with the little bugs, such as:
- the player randomly decides to skip to the next track. this didn't seem to be a big deal until i started listening to more hour-long dj sets. if you're right in the middle of a good set and it skips, it's VERY ANNOYING! the fast-forward takes about 10 seconds to skip 1 minute, so this isn't much fun at all.
- the player DOES read multisession discs, but only sometimes. it is not uncommon for me to have to rescan the disc up to 5 times to recognize the other sessions.
- it skips like mad unless the mp3 cd was burned at 1x. how the heck do i burn at 1x with my 24x, all the software offers the lowest setting of 8x. i am using my old 2x burner without BURN-proof.
- it is supposed to play VCDs, and indeed, it does, but i cannot get a non-fuzzy picture out of it, and no sound at all. i would have returned it under warranty for this reason alone if i had realized before the warranty period ended.
all in all, i have gone through a lot of frustration in using this player during my commute every day. i am looking to buy a RAM based one because of the smaller size, lower weight, and unskipability.
They were only 30$ at best buy last week, I've had one for a couple years, 10 hours of music per CD, and no need to worry about about OS support, just burn the MP3s right onto CD, done.
refurbed ipods seem to run about $250 and look to run in linux via
xpod
and windows via ephpod with macopener
i guess this is until there is some kernel driver for HFS+ or someone finds a way to convert a mac ipod to a windows ipod with the fat32 format...
Stop running!What kind of geek runs? If you run at 8 mph, you're loosing a full hour of computer-time for every run! Just think of all the things you could do with an extra hour a day. Like
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Try a Minidisc for this kind of stuff - it is slower to transfer music to the minidisc itself rather than with MP3 players, but more durable than hard disks on the run. The discs themselves are quite cheap so are probably a better bet than solid state MP3 players. The new NetMD thing (faster recording ability) might be a problem on *nixes, but an analogue hookup (or digital via the SP/DIF cables) are pretty good for recording music, but only in real time. The recorders also have the additional benefit of being dictaphones if you really need one (or for recording concerts etc.). If you use pdas a lot you might consider a SD card/memory stick bases solution just for being able to move stuff between your pda/digital camera/portable player etc.
Here's a link to Sony's Walkman page.
Hit the link at the top right of the page (its a pop-up mind) which says S2 Sports - they have their own dedicated line of sports products including NetMD minidisc recorder/player.
It's none of my business, but running is REALLY bad for you.
I do encourage exercise, however, running is one of the worst things you can do to your body, ever.
Please take up some form of exercise that does not damage your body so much, like swimming, or rowing, or even biking.
Even walking is better for you than running. You think you can't "burn as many calories", or can't "get your heartrate up" with any other form of exercise, but I tell you brother, you are dead WRONG. You're a victim of running hype.
Well, listen to me or not, I don't care. Pay me now, or pay me later. In closing let me state that 100% of the runners I know (and I know a lot of runners) have problems with their joints when they reach middle age, 40's and 50's.
Good luck to you.
It may not be a Rio 600/800/900, but FreeBSD has support for the Rio 500 MP3 player and the kernel can be built with the driver support. More information about the drive can be found at the project's home page or the urio(4) man page. I'm not sure if the driver will support the newer Rio players, but you might be able to find a decent Rio 500 on eBay or other sites.
I suggest you get a player that uses a flash chip format: CompactFlash, MMC / SD, SmartMedia, or Memory Stick. Then get one of those USB chip read/write drives for your desktop computer.
With a laptop, you can either use a USB drive, or you can get a PC Card adapter that lets you plug in the chip directly.
This is how I manage my digital photos from my digital camera: I never plug in the camera, and haven't installed the special camera software. I just slot the chip into the drive, and treat it as just another "disk".
If you do this with a Mac, it will stick Mac junk on the chip ("finder.dat" files and such) but it will work. On Windows or Linux, it will just work.
I will not ever buy a player that requires me to use a special version of MusicMatch Jukebox to transfer files. Ever.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Just today I checked sourceforge and downloaded nomadII-utils. It works with my Nomad 11 (with no internal mem but a 64 meg Smart Memory card). Console line control. I can do everything I used to boot to Windows to do-upload, download, change FM presets, it even syncs the time from linux (I'm running Mandrake 8.2).
Unlike the other players mentioned so far, the Nomad is small and does not ever skip when I run. Give it a try-the creator of the software even made a rpm for simpletons like me.
I recently bought a Nike PSA 120, made by the folks that brought you the original Rio. It takes tiny little MM cards and can support at least 128MB.
/ rioutil/
This unit is designed for use with sports and works pretty well. There is a belt clip, but also an armband onto which the unit can be screwed, not clipped, screwed, so it won't fall off. The unit it self is palm sized and uses one battery. The controls are simple to use, but there is no fancy LCD. The included remote does have one, but I don't like it so much.
The windows software isn't so great, but it will convert MP3's to lower bit rates from higher ones. I especially like this for 15-20 mile bike rides, as can fit 50 or so songs into 128MB.
If you are interested in small, light, and no-skip play, this i pretty decent. The interface is minimalist, but it is perfect for jogging, riding, or other more physical endeavours.
Try this for Linux software:
http://http://sourceforge.net/projects
Seriously... why look for a UNIX-compatible MP3 player when you can have an MP3 + Ogg + MOD player that *runs* UNIX?
I've been using my iPAQ (with Linux) as a portable music player for a while, and it works extremely well. Capacity is not enormous, but you can add compact flash cards (or even PCMCIA hard drives if you don't mind the bulk).
-John
Here's what I suggest. Go to eBay and get a rio 500. They're going for $50. Here are some of the reasons why...
1) Full VBR and all bitrate MP3 support
2) Great command line linux utilities to transfer mp3s. Fast and easy to use.
3) upgradable firmware (the latest versions add some great features)
4) SmartMedia support
5) Long battery life
6) it's $50
7) lasts forever
8) never skips or fades
9) fast USB transfer. It only takes 2-3 minutes to change music with the linux utilities.
I put a 64 meg card in mine (giving me 128 megs of space), and with a good encoder (such as LAME ABR) 3 cds worth of music will sound just fine.
I've used mine for running and working out for years and it's showing signs of wear, but still working great and it's still as solid as the day I bought it.
Yes yes, I record video game music on MD as well. Metropolis Street Racer has an awesome sound track, so long it won't fit on an MD!!!
Ogg is inherently a better-designed format than MP3 (MP3 has a few major flaws, first among them the lack of an independent scalefactor for frequencies over 16 kHz), so all other things equal Ogg would sound better at the same bitrate (or equal at lower bitrates). But all other things aren't equal -- MP3 has a very highly tuned encoder in LAME, when used with the --alt-preset command line options ("lame --alt-preset standard file.wav file.mp3" is the command-line most people should use, and ends up with files averaging in the 190-200 kbps range). The Ogg encoder hasn't been nearly as well tuned, and most listening tests seem to indicate that to match --alt-preset standard's quality, you need to use -q6 with Ogg, which averages around 192 kbps -- the same bitrate as with MP3. So your Ogg files will sound about the same at the same bitrate as your (well-encoded) MP3 files.
Ogg does have a few other advantages, including its ReplayGain support and its lack of patents. And since the format itself is inherently better, it should beat MP3's quality eventually (though it may take a while, as most Ogg development is currently focused on low-bitrate encoding for streaming, not high-quality encoding for archival).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
My Diamond RIO 500 only has 32Meg of memory and it's far too small for me. If I only want to stick a couple of tracks onto it for a quick journey then it's fine but for anything more than 40 minutes playback, it's no good.
RealPlayer supports the one I use, the very first mp3 player. Be careful with it(Also called the RioOne) because it ONLY SUPPORTS 16 or 32mb SM cards, ignore what the box says.
As for future ones, I'm looking at the Kyocera 7135. It's a color Palm/Cellphone/Mp3/GPS device all in one. It'll replace my Visor Platinum. And GREAT battery life from what I hear. It'll play songs off of the SD/MMC slot.
The SlimX is pretty good. It's a cd/mp3 player, but the good folks at iriver are planning on getting ogg into the thing. Otherwise, get a Zaurus witht the tkcPlayer :)
I've just completed my second hard drive upgrade to the Archos Jukebox which I heartily recommend as a jogging companion. They are just a little wider than the 2.5 inch notebook drives inside them [about 6x as thick], and easily portable enough for a jacket pocket or on a belt.
Go here for detailed instructions on upgrading the drive, Toshiba 40 gig drives go for $150 and work fantastic.
I have every one of my 500 CDs [all purchased legitimately, I don't believe in screwing the artists, especially in obscure genres] on there with plenty of room to grow. Remember that the Kbps you rip your MP3s at affect how many reads from the drive the player does and therefore how skip-prone the hard-drive based players are - I rip at 128 and rarely have problems with it skipping due to movement while the drive reads.
Nothing is like having so much music in such a little space. My Archos and Gameboy Advance make all my commutes and air travel 1000x more enjoyable.
My Clie PEG-N760C works great for MP3 playing. The sound quality is good and it has a convenient remote dongle (good for jogging--can keep it in an inside pocket).
the downside is that the linux support for MemStick is flakey at best. Yes I've put files on it using Linux, Yes I've also corrupted the filesystem in the process. YMMV
Good Luck...Solves two problems (and a 128M stick holds about two hours of music which should be good for eight miles...even if you have to switch it isn't the end of the world)
Brian
[16:43] * Marco` 's looking for pics of Ms. Fent
[16:44] but it's awful
[16:44] There's this pic: http://www.sarcasta.net/general_images/idiot.jpg
[16:44] holy fuck
[16:44] who is that ugly cunt?
[16:44] fent
[16:45] she is ugly with a capitol flacid penis
[16:45] lol
[16:45] there goes 3 months of effort with the penis pump
iPod works pretty well with BSD. Okay, okay, so it's not the flavor you mention. Still. I doubt you'll get any player that has better integration with a *nix workalike than the iPod and MacOS X.
(No, I have neither. Just stating the facts.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
the GPMM2 ported now to Gnome2 has great support for usb mass storage device class, such as the one they sell at k-mart.
-Nadav
What is this "running" activity that you speak of?
2) The screen is kinda small
3) It crashes on VBR MP3s sometime. Not too often but enough to notice
4) Turning it on is irritatingly long. You'd think it's just a few seconds, but...
You need RockBox. The purpose of this project is to write an Open Source replacement firmware for the Archos Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio and Recorder MP3 players.
Get it now. It, um, rocks. Really.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
The diamond rio had some support but it was shaky and anything but user-friendly. I was also not impressed with the 64 mb of space either.
The portable hard drive options looked good, lots of space and easy to configure Linux to mount the thing. I was a little worried about how long it would take to move a gb of stuff through USB.
I eventually decided to get a sony diskman with mp3 support. This allowed me to play existing cds, or burn cdrw in mp3 mode. The cd burning utilities were more advanced than the rio tools and I could burn different disks with different stuff and then easily switch out the disks. The thing runs for many hours on a set of batteries, at least 10h. Its not as portable as the rio, but not much bigger than an Archos.
Buy an iPod. Apple so squarely has the rest of the market beat, that it's worth installing a windows partition just to interface with the unit.
I've owned a Nomad Jukebox and used an Archos model, and they're both horribly inferior to the Apple unit.
Note that it's somewhat easy to scratch the exterior, but the new iPods come with a decent carrying case, so that's mostly irrelevent.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
I've had the Jukebox Recorder 20 for about 6 months and it rocks. It does MP3 encoding up to 160kbps VBR, shows up as a SCSI harddisk when you plug it in, supports USB2 (~400Mbs - note, the other Archos units only support USB1.1, so the connection is slower). Also, there is an open OS project for the Archos drives, so there might be a possibility of OGG playback on it, though there might not be if the MP3 playback is all being done by a dedicated ASIC that only does MP#. I am overall happy with it, though it would have been nice if they had included a mic preamp (the builtin mic picks up the HD noise ever few minutes when the buffer gets flushed). Had they, it would have been the live recordist's (bootlegger's) dream, as you can record a whole show including all of the opening bands without stopping to change the media. All that said, it is a harddisk, so jogging might not be the best thing for it. I've read reviews that say it is rock solid and others that say that jostling it quickly causes HD death. My biggest bit of advice if you are wanting to use it with Linux is to get something that looks like a USB/SCSI harddisk rather than one that only talks a proprietary language with the computer (I seem to remember the non-CD-based Rios being in this category, which is part of why I went with the Archos.) Note, if they use VFAT/FAT32 compact flash, then you can always just put the CF in your computer (USB, PCMCIA, EIDE adapter) and write to it as a HD and then put it back in the unit.
I know your first thought is to say why would you want a cd mp3 player for jogging, but I have one, take it jogging, and have zero problems with skipping. and this is with CDRW and 192 kbps files. Its sturdy, fits well in my hand and has the best interface I've seen in an mp3 player besides the iPod.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I think I've commented on something like this before. MD's are nice for their size and if you don't mind high compression for lower sound quality (fine for working out) then you can squeeze in excess of 3 hours onto an MD using Sony's PROPRIETARY ATRAC-3 encoding. I'm sure it doesn't work on Linux for the USB delivery system. You basically recompress your MP3 to ATRAC when using the "NetMD" line. My problem is durability and features in a single unit. Sony has FINALLY released a 'Sport' model to the MD line but it has no inline remote. Major suckage because you need to handle the device to change tracks. I've also laid waste to 3 portables though my current one still works I have the battery door duct taped and the remote doesn't really work. (Are you listening Sony?) What I now the majority of the time is a miniCD mp3 player. 3 hours of music at 160K works for me. Battery life is good. Handles the elements pretty well and rarely skips while cycling. Running though you'd be suited best to solid state. That's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Eh?
I bought a Samsung Yepp YP 700, it holds 128 megs, voice records (ok, i haven't used that feature that much yet) and has smart media for expansion... I love the thing, sold all my CDs back and bought one with the profits..
cheers.
Minidiscs never caught on because they use a lossy compression algorhythm. MP3 is already lossy, by putting them onto an MD, you are seriously crippling the audio quality by doubly compressing and compensating for silence samples in the data. If you insist on using portable players to transfer your MP3s in anything but MP3 format, DAT is the way to go - it's a perfect reproduction.
Of course, your best bet is to avoid MP3s, which pretty much destroy the sound anyway - you should go with ogg-vorbis (still lossy, but less so), or even better shn (shorten) format, a lossless compression scheme.
I do run quite a bit also and chose the Nike psa play (made by RIO) because it's expandable to 128M, it's lightweight, and it straps to one's arm for easy carrying. When I bought it ($300 ~ 2.5 years ago), there wasn't any software available for linux to manage the device. However, I recently checked again for software so I could elimintate the last remaining reason for a windows partition on my system. What I found are the rio-utilities at http://rioutil.sourceforge.net/ . Getting music onto the device was touch and go at first - i ended up reformatting the memory on the device because the rio-utilities software had problems recognizing the format as laid down by the windows software. Also, I had to transfer music to the device one memory card at a time - that is, I had to remove the external memory card and fill up the internal memory first. Once that was filled, I could insert the external card into the unit and then fill it up. Now that I've spent a little time figuring out the software and learning work arounds, I haven't had any problems and use the rio-utilities software exclusively to manage the device. Oh ya - one be-atch about the psa play - it won't play files randomly.
This topic reminds me a past /. posting on pretty much the same topic. It was a review on the Nex II Compact Flash MP3 player that connects through USB and is accessible from Linux as an SCSI drive. The unit is very cheap, around $70 without CF card - I ended up buying it.
You'll find it here.
I snagged a NomadII MG from Ebay and slapped a 128Mb card (also from ebay) into it. 192MB total.. enough for ~40 songs (Rush-type songs... 5-8 mins per) @112kbps. I use it when riding the motorcycle and it's great for having about 3-5 hours of non-repeating music. I think the entire bundle cost less than $250..
It's been great. And though I've only tinkered with the linux tools for the thing, they seem to tranfer stuff well & easily. All they really require is USB device filesystem compiled into the kernel.. at this point there's not even a kernel module needed. Plus, there's an FM tuner on the thing.. not nearly as good as my Walkman AM/FM radio, but it's nice to have handy. The only complaint are the buttons.. it's way to easy to bump it when in my riding jacket and pause/switch mode/delete. Otherwise, it performs excellent. Quite pleased.
-'fester
[ Corporate Page |
Linux support ]
I have had nothing but good experiences with this one. It's a smaller (64M onboard, can take a 128M smartmedia card) solid-state player that I got mainly to take something cycling and such with me.
The Linux support is great, if you don't mind using a commandline tool. The USB hookup works flawlessly.
It holds about 3 hours worth of music (at 192M), but the advantage of being small is that it also plays for about 8 hours on a single AA cell.
I bought a Creative Labs Nomad II refurbed from Creatives website (no memory included). Plugged in a 128 MB CF Card. (Bought from pricewatch) Plugged the USB cable in. Loaded the software (command line only but a GUI is beta) get it here: http://nomadii.sourceforge.net/ And I was done! Couldn't be easier. Dare I say easier than windows? Bought it for jogging as well, must've dropped it half a dozen times. NO scratches and still works like it was new. Couldn't be happier. Good Luck!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
I bought a Rio 500 several years back. I have been happy with it - it plays my music. Thought it only has 64Mb of on board flash memory, that is plenty - it is an hour's worth at 128kbps (I have found that I cannot really tell the difference between 128 and 160 or 192 while outside running, which tends to bring a lot of noise), and it is expandable via SmartMedia cards to 192Mb. The linux drivers are excellent and can be found at http://rio500.sourceforge.net. There is no GUI that I know of, but the command line interface is easy to use and powerful.
Interestingly, the linux drivers have functionality that the Windows drivers are missing:
First, I have found that the player actually supports bitmap fonts, and about 30 of them come with the linux drivers (of course, feel free to download more or make your own).
Secondly, it is possible to change the title display from the default filename.mp3 to Title - Artist, or indeed any other ID3 fields.
Finally, and most importantly, it is possible (only via the linux drivers, afaik) to send songs in both directions, i.e., send them to the player and get them back. This is really handy if your mp3 directory gets wiped, or you're at a friends house and he has some music you'd like. In fact, it is possible to use the player as a small portable HD - you can send it any file you want, sort of like the story a while back about the guy who walked into CompUSA and copied Office:Mac from a G4 using his iPod.
For these reasons, I believe the Rio 500 is a truly superb machine, and I would recommend it to anybody who can live with 64 Mb. Have fun jogging!
Well, I have an ancient Rio PMP 300. This hasn't been made for ages, so I'm not recommending it, but my experiences running with it might be of some interest to you.
1. _any_ spinning-media player is unsuitable for running, period.
2. surprisingly, even solid-state players aren't immune from shock related problems - bump the PMP300 in the right direction and the battery loses contact for enough time to reset the unit. Those players (the panasonic, the rio/nike units) that mount on the arm rather than the waist will survive this better (I think also that the 300 isn't very well designed in this regard). Also, check the earphone jack - I know some people who had crackling problems on (newer) rios due to dry solder connections on the earphone socket.
3. you don't need high-bitrate mp3s - 64kbps is fine for everything, given the vastly suboptimal listening contitions (traffic noise, one's own breathing sound, windnoise etc.) you'll experience on your run. For some stuff, 32kbps is quite acceptable. Downsampling your mp3 collection before uploading to the player thus greatly increases your music-milage.
4. if you're planning on using it as "soundtrack" to some event, for God's sake plan on using only one set of media - I've seen some dude try to change smartmedia cards on his player midway through a triathlon (on the bike section). Not pretty. Check your player's specs carefully - lots of players can only use media up to a certain size - often less than is now available.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
You're stuck with realtime speeds loading music on the media. It takes 74 minutes to fill up a disk with 74 minutes worth of tunes. The other problem is that I have home mp3 server with my entire collection on it. No batch copy, no drag 'n' drop just a phono plug. Try me again when I can do a :
/dev/minidisc /mnt/minidisc /mnt/minidisc
mount -t vfat
cp -r tunes/
and fill a disc up in 5 minutes or less.
I have a Nike psa[play and I love it. The software could be better, but I think it's all based ont he same stuff the the Rio uses, and I saw some linux drivers out there somewhere. Anyway, the psa[play is nice because it's *meant* for running and stuff. Take a look at it.
There are a lot of posts here about hard drive and CD based MP3 players. Those seem to miss the point that this is a player for 8 mi. runs. A HD or CD player is going to be too big, too heavy, and too fragile for this use.
What I use for my longer runs, mountain biking, and snowboarding is a D-Link DMP-210. It's:
Downsides are:
There are some other lightweight players out there, and I'd really recommend something under 3 ounces or you won't be able to stuff it in a shorts/jersey pocket without it bouncing around. Armband straps can help there.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
- It's the thinnest mp3 cd player out there (it uses those gum-stick batteries seen in minidisk players)
- Firmware Flashable
- Supports ID3 tags
- MP3, AAC, and WMF format compatible (I believe OGG format is in the works, it'e mentioned manual)
- Backlit in-line remote (like minidisk players again)
- user definable EQ, with like 5 presets
- AC adapter, external battery pack, and it charges it's batteries when you tell it to when it's connected to AC.
- It supports both Rockridge extensions, and M$'s Joliet. I have long filenames on my cds, and they all work perfectly (unlike the other piece of plastic shit I purchased off Spamazon for $160 two years ago)
- AAAAANNND, a built in FM tuner with presets
Ofcourse there are a bunch more features, and I suggest you read the main product page which includes the specs, what included accessories, and you can BUY it for $149.95 USD.da w00t. mtfnpy?
The Apple iPod is the best. It is much tinier and cuter than the Jukebox, and can hold up to 20 gigs. xTunes (tex9.com) provides Linux support for the iPod which I can certify works fine. However, you must have access to a Mac or PC with xPlay to update the firmware, currently 1.0.2. Buy a $30 firewire card and transfer five gigabytes in ten minutes (This particular card worked under linux on my x86).
If I could sell my puke for cash, I'd buy three.
I have a Neo Jukebox that I love.
.m3u playlists.
http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/neojukebox/
It is easily upgradeable and uses standard
Wes
I have my rio800 with 128MB of storage. Currently holding about 3 hrs of music, it hits their claim of 11hrs of playing on a charge without much problem, and doesn't take very long to charge (20 min usually does it) And it never skips.
The software it comes with now sucks... I hate realplayer... Go find RioPort on the net for windows. For linux rioutil has been working great, except I need to fix my permission problems...
Of course, those mp3 jukeboxes that hold 20gig of music sure are looking nice...
I've got a TDK Mojo, and I like it well enough, though I'm not that demanding... I just want to make a reasonable mix, put it on random and sometimes forward past tracks that don't strike me as perfect for the moment. It does that quite fine.
The problem with RIOs is that they use proprietary memory expansion modules. You want more space, you buy RIO's memory. I've also read that RIO doesn't have the clearest sound in the world, in comparison to other portables. I have a nomadIIc from creative and love it. It's light, can accept standard memory, works fine w/ Linux, and has great battery life. I'd say, go with that.
I have a archos recorder 20G - I love it. But...
The guy talks about a 8 mile run. The archos is slightly heavy for that. it will not be comftarble while jogging, at all.
A solid state device looks like a better option then a HD based device.
If you think the next year is going to bring some really cheap, big storage, ogg compatible players (I do) then you may want to just get the cheapest thing now and plan to upgrade.
Something like the Audiophase player costs $50 at BestBuy, plays mp3 CDs (and CD-RWs) comes with a car kit, runs for hours on two AAs (I use rechargables), and has decent skip protection. 650MB CDs aren't as nice as a big hard drive but it's still holds a lot of music and swapping them is easy.
Absolutely, do not consider an MP3 player that is not solid state. It will skip while you're in motion just like your walkman does at the beginning and end of every tape. Do not consider an MP3 player that cannot hold less than 128MG, and more is better, since you need music for 8 miles. (I have 64 internal, 64 external.) Of course, if you'd prefer not to notice your MP3 player while running, the Rio 600 is perfect, it's small, and the belt clip means the headphone cord is not getting tangled up like some connected to your arm might be. One note: I did not like the Rio-included headphones, just use your favorite from your existing musical gadget.
No seriously, I bought one of these Nex II players (w/ a 265 meg card). I have used mine extensively on runs. Even long runs. *pause* Very long runs. I once took mine on a 50-miler. It worked great. (Of course, I swapped out the batteries and listened to all the music about 3 or 4 times). I want to get another compact flash card, but haven't been able to scrap together the dough.
The real silver bullet to good programs is caffeine; lots and lots of caffeine! *twitch, twitch*
Is nobody else here a runner? I run 7.5 miles a day so I can tell you that you can't use an Archos Jukebox Studio 20 for that. It's super nice MP3 player but it's too WAY to heavy and it would be almost impossible to control without having to stop. You need something super light (Like a flash memory player) that you can strap or clip onto your arm or the small of your back. If it slaps against you you're going to get sore after a couple miles. I have a Samsung YEP YP-NDU (about a year old) It's got a remote I clip on my shoulder and the player I put in the small of my back, makes it real easy to control and I don't even feel it.
... the world's best mp3 player works beautifully with the world's best* unix. Does that help?
(* YMMV. Any *nix is fine in my book. I just stick by my preference as the best for me. )
John Kenneth Fisher
Table of malContents
Pros:
- Very light and small. I have found that anything I have to carry affects my stride (arm motion) in a significant way (seems trivial, but it's not).
- Very good Linux support here. USB transfer works seamlessly and is reasonably fast.
- 64MB is good for an hour of music. With a 64MB card you're out to 128MB -- two hours without repeats is quite good unless you're out for a very long run.
- All-solid-state means it never, ever skips. Not sure if you can say the same about HD-based players, even the ones with a big read-ahead memory.
- No DRM crap to put up with (not that I encountered, anyway).
Cons:
- Battery compartment is slightly over-sized so the unit sometimes power cycles if the lid comes loose.
- Not weather- or sweat-proof. I used to run with mine encased in a zip-loc bag with slits cut into it for the clip and headphones, and it still freaked out a few times when it got a bit damp.
- Build quality is not very good. Battery compartment door hinge partially broke when I dropped it. Buttons and case have a thin cosmetic silver coating which wore away quickly with use.
- Firmware is susceptible to getting corrupted, either due to a glitch in the firmware itself or to outside factors (moisture shorts, etc.). You can get firmware updates and a repair utility here, but the repair utility doesn't always work -- in my case, the glitch requires me to send the thing back to SonicBlue for repair. I've encountered a number of anecdotal descriptions of similar problems elsewhere on the web.
Bottom line:
The ease with which the firmware glitched to kill my player would lead me not to buy another one, unless I could find it on Ebay for under $50. I'm thinking about either a Rio 800/900 (Linux drivers available here) or an iPod, but I have doubts about the latter because I run pretty hard and I am not convinced that the playback will still be skip-free after the 20-minute HD read-ahead buffer is emptied, nor that the HD can handle years of continuous jostling.
I have the rio riot. You can't mount it as an external harddrive. The Musicmatch software it came with does not copy over the proper song information. So half of my music is mislabeled. When I try to listen to Tom Petty by artist it tells me file 0 does not exist. The album name is greatest hits which is the same as like 5 other albums on my rio so when I try to play greatest hits I have to listen to all the other cds as well. The radio gets one station in atlanta clearly. My car stereo gets like 15. This thing is a piece. Don't waste your money.
The Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox is a decent little player. The Windows driver is not my favourite, but that doesn't bother me 'cause I wrote a nifty little KDE app to manage it. If you have a NJB, check out kionjb.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kionjb
ok so its only 128MB. but i just use it to go to and from work in the morning (40 mins either way).
so what's so great about it? its not that small either... but, it has probably the best amp out of the mp3 players i've used (rio, panasonic) and it comes with a great set of street-style speakers as well.
can't comment on the linux support - and being on dialup in a hotel at the moment, i'm not so big into finding out. sorry. <insert ode to DSL here>
I too am a very very satisfied NEX II owner...Bought largely based on the rave reviews here in the 2000 Ask Slashdot article, and just read the rave reviews at cnet.com. 92% approval! Including some idiot who put his pan of the Rio 800 in the Nex II review section! For exercise especially, where weight is a concern, the NEX II is a champ. I convinced my girlfriend and two other friends to buy one and they love it.
.m3u playlists which would be wonderful. And, there is a bug (Frontier Labs has told me they know about it) in the unit's display when playing VBR mp3s. Namely, it uses the instantaneous bit rate and the size of the file to estimate how much play time is left for a song. This means the display is always wildly changing while a song is playing, giving you no useful info about play time for VBR tunes. Note, however, VBR songs still play just fine. The NEX II always sounds great...the equalizer is very functional and completely customizable.
And Frontier Labs are a nice, decent company to deal with. About 2 months into my NEX II ownership, I yanked the thing off an exercise machine and it took a hard fall...the LCD screen stopped working. Shipped it off to Frontier Labs, they sent it back w/in 3 days of receipt good as new, no questions. The largest delay factor was simply the unfortunate fact that Frontier Labs is based in Hong Kong.
Which brings me to some questions about this device perhaps the savvy Slashdot community will know. What is up with Frontier Labs?! Why are they not marketing the heck out of the NEX II? You really have to dig to find one of these...buy.com occasionally carries it, but certainly none of the big consumer retail outlets do. I got mine via Ebay from Choke Slam Media, a little mom'n'pop reseller, hilariously endorsed by Frontier Labs themselves.
And why is support for the NEX II at an apparent stand-still since like 1999 or 2000? There have been zero firmware upgrades since then, and there are some obvious bug fixes/feature additions. The one-level-deep directory structure has been mentioned. There is no support for
The last question is...have any NEX II users found an armband style case that fits the NEX II? I run with mine, and though the factory case is highly funtional, and the belt clip quite sturdy, it chafes after a reasonable run. Last time MP3 players were discussed, somebody mentioned the Amphipod which is an ergonomic, "chafe-less" waist pack that looks awesome, but I wonder if their Micropack Landsport fits the NEX II. Any suggestions in this regard?
What's your advantage here? The cheapest I could find for a 1gb CF microdrive is $289. Add the cost of your player and you could have bought an iPod and the tex9 iPod plugin for xtunes ($10) for linux...and then you're still missing out on 4gb's! Sorry, but this doesn't make much sense to me. Can someone please explain?
My NEXII is currently in the posession of my brother who is carrying it with him as he hikes the Appalachian trail. He has it to listen to the Lord of the Rings a few hours a day while he hikes.
The fact that it only uses Compact Flash cards (no internal memory) allows me to mail him more cards and let him listen to new content without having to mail the player back home to be re-filled.
<freedom rant>
Because this player takes CF cards and behaves like a external drive it does not have any SDMI/DRM trappings of other players, allowing me to put whatever I want on the player from whatever computer I choose. Plus it works great with my linux box as a removable drive (no dumb special purpose drivers or reverse engineered hacks).
</freedom rant>
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
If you want to run with it you want one with flash memory - not with hard drive. y favourite here is Nomad II. I bought one on sale with 128MB card for slightly less than $100. t has radio, wired remote. Voice quality is good (made by Creative). Linux support is good/satisfactory. GUI needs development but CLI is solid. Web page is http://nomadii.sourceforge.net/
What? You really meant 'linux' ?
OK....this has bugged for years....
"Minidiscs never caught on because they use a lossy compression algorhythm"
I wonder how MP3 caught on then...
I mean if all that people cared about was sound quality,
I think I would have a 1/2 inch reel-to-reel in my car by now.
(analog tapes are lossy, yet they are everywhere...why is that??)
There are different uses for different technologies.
CONVENIENCE VS. QUALITY.
Scenario 1.
Quality.
I really like the sound quality of DAT.
It's sampling rate is higher than that of cd (48Khz).
I also have -all the time in the world- to fast forward and rewind what are essentially cassette tapes 2.0.
I can overlook such things as bulky players, delicate internal mechinisms,
and fragile tapes.... for some of the best quality possible.
Scenario 2.
Convenience.
"I'm usually on the go when i listen to music.
I really like being able to throw my MD in my pocket with a couple of discs and go.
I can overlook things like "lossless" recording, higher frequencies i can't hear,
and the ability to trade DAT GD/Phish/DMB shows
for the versitiliy and convenience of minidisc."
Now this is a little silly...people don't talk like this...but they do SHOP like this.
HOW and WHERE do you do your listening?
In the car?
In a private listening room with headphones?
In a subway train?
Is space limited?
Is there a lot of background noise?
All of these things must be factored before a decision can be made on the appropriate format for the occasion.
FYI, I personally use...
MD when biking, walking around,
DAT when mastering/archiving studio tracks,
CD when in the shower,
Vinyl in a quiet room and headphones,
Car-MP3CD when driving,
HD-MP3 for my main jukebox,
MD-Data for recording OUT of the studio,
ADAT for recording IN the studio,
and old analog tapes for mixes for my not-so-high tech friends.
Everything has it's place.
And runs linux. natively. You can develop on it, though I prefer to ssh to it. Get a wireless card if you want it to be really portable or want to run kismet.
I've been using a Nomad IIc for the last 6-8 months whilst working out at the gym. The Linux command-line app I use is pretty straight forward, you can even batch upload a playlist via it's FTP-like commands. Since the app uses the Linux USB file system, I don't think it's portable to other *NIX platforms at the moment (but I may be wrong).
Since I use a treadmill or cross-country simulator as part of the workout, I like the light weight and smallish size (clips nicely on the hip or on an arm band) since it doesn't bounce around much. The Smartmedia cards are pretty cheap right now (I bought a batch of 3 128MB cards for ~$40/each at my local Fry's), so I can have different music for different days without having to remember to re-upload a new list.
The only complaint I have is the headphones are a little on the cheap side, and will need to be replaced soon thanks to the decomposing foam pads (though that's mainly thanks to regular use and a genetic pre-disposition to sweating while exerting myself, I think). Other than that, I'd vouch for it, and I seem to recall it was pretty cheap at Tiger and a few other online outlets.
Good luck finding the right fit!
--
-- "I have a great faith in fools. Self-confidence, some call it..."
I have the Nomand IIc with 128 Mb internal memory, USB port, and a smart media socket that will take up to (and including) a 128 Mb card. I have it working with Slackware 8.1 using command line tools and I'm looking for a graphical tool. I remember from the docs that it is software upgradeable so Creative Labs *may* add ogg support at a later date. Or they may not. Only the folks at Creative Labs know for certain.
I would recommend the Diamond Rio 500 all the way. The only problem is that I'm not sure they make them anymore. But, if you can find one, the linux support for them is excellent, they have a sleek design, 64Mb internal memory with smart media expansion slot, good battery life, etc. I've had one for a couple of years now - best buy I ever made.
(My apologies if english is not your first language.)
"I want something that works good with Linux/OpenBSD"
"Good" is now an adverb?! You don't need an mp3 player; you need lessons on basic grammer. Since this is slashdot though, it seems that the only requirement is random words that might be english.
--
OK, not the "cheap" option, and probably not the option for the highest quality sound.. But it sure is useful!
I managed to find software: MJ-Tools which enabled me to load files from Linux to my Handspring Visor Prism's "MiniJam" MP3 player. I love the fact that it has two slots for MMCs!
The PJB100 was the first harddrive mp3 player to market (with 4G drive!), and is still going strong now. In fact, many of the original models now have up to 40G drives, and are still going themselves!
it has a open-source linux SDK and many tools (linux, win32, mac os and OSX). 10-12 hours battery life - i use it 10 hours a day, every day. it recharges in under 3 hours. the firmware hasn't been upgraded in a year, but it's stable and mature. it has a gorgeous large screen. and built-in games! it also supports gapless encoding (either directly or with exact audio copy's audio image/cue file ripping), which is great for live recordings, dance or classical.
it's also pretty large compared to the others (about the size of a not-so-modern cassette walkman), although it comes with belt buckle etc, i'd stick it in a bag on my back instead for jogging etc. also, usb is much slower than firewire, but this unit is almost 3 years old. you can buy them from thinkgeek, mp3factorydirect.com or many other providers, in up to 40G sizes, though 60G is just around the corner! (the drives just got released in japan last month)
if you're looking to upgrade an existing PJB, you need a 9.5mm high 2.5" laptop harddrive. the best are the toshiba GAS/GAP units, which give the best performance as the PJB is able to use a sneaky way to conserve power between reads.
also on the horizon is the PJB-300, though this will just be issued by the same marketing company, not manufactured by the same people (which was compaq, in this case).
no details have been released yet, though the company has been taking ideas from the PJB100's userlist, so it should hopefully be better than the pjb100!
hope this helps,
fross
I have an Archos jukebox as well and love it. However, I remember reading somewhere that they are not recommended for joggers as the constant movement can damage the hard drive inside. This would probably not be a good suggestion here as he is asking for something to use during 8 mile runs.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
You:
What? You really meant 'linux' ?
From the oringinal post:
I want something that works good with Linux/OpenBSD.
Nothing worse then a fuckstick that's only interested in making a lame point. Pay attention. When you, as an apparent Mac junky, make snot ass comments like this, it relates back to the Mac community at large. So on their behalf, thanks for taking a big shit on their image. Bitch.
With all due respect, the iPod takes the cake as far as MP3 players go. It's small, lightweight, got a huge capacity, looks cool (yeah, stupid reason), and now, it's reasonably priced.
I've owned Rios of all flavors, Nomad I and Nomad II. My biggest complaint with any MP3 player that uses Smartmedia, CompactFlash, or any other type of flash card memory is that it's just NOT ENOUGH storage. The most I've had was 128megs in my Nomad II (and a couple years ago, 128megs cost a lot more than it does now). 128megs is just enough to hold your average cd at 192k/sec. Yes, yes, you can downsample. But at 128k/sec you maybe able to squeeze in two albums.
Whereas with the iPod, with the 5gig minimum, you have plenty of room to breathe. I don't have to worry about downsampling my collection just to fit an album or two on a Rio or Nomad.
All in all, I just don't think flash card based MP3 players are worthwhile. Personally, I found it easier to use my Sony Discman (and that's why I eventually sold my Nomad II; my last flash card based player).
I bought a 10gig a few months after it was released and when the new 20s were announced, I sold my 10 and ordered the 20.
I have an Aiwa CD/MP3 deck in my car (the first generation) and ever since I bought my iPod, I've been using that in the car via the mini-in, instead of CDs with MP3s burned on them.
I've also been using the iPod as a portable HD. A great tool for backing mail files and transporting large movie files from the office to home.
Overall, I'm a big iPod fan and I recommend them to PC and Mac users alike.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's *nix tools to use the iPod in a *nix environment. There are a couple of sites on the web by people who want to use the iPod in Linux, but it doesn't look like they're going to get it working anytime soon.
I'm strictly a PC user (Windows 9x/NT/2K/XP, Linux, FreeBSD; more FreeBSD than Linux). I own a newer iBook and have become an OS X fan. But I use my iPod in Windows using Ephpod and MacDrive. I found that iTunes just wasn't for me, especially since Ephpod will import Winamp playlists.
Good luck in your quest for an MP3 player.
I'm completely satisfied with my Diva mp3-player. It's very small (one of the smallest having this big memory capacity) and light anf the buttons are easy to feal even through your pockets so you don't have to take the player out when adjusting the volume and so on.
I bought it with a 128MB CF1 card and together with the internal 32MB I have room for a couple of hours of music. The max CF1 size was 512MB at the time I bought mine, maybe there are even larger now?
Here in Sweden I bought it for $150, but as usual I suspect it is much cheaper in the US.
No problem to use it under Linux; I have a nice s cript that empties it and fiils it with random songs from my collection.
I have a Rio 500 and I haven't heard of any linux support for it? Could you give us the webpage for this stuff? I like my rio other then the fact that the 128mb card I bought doesn't work in it, and would like to get it to talk to my linux box.
I think what is important here is that it is going to be used for running, sports, etc... I to run alot and what I need it an mp3 player that can take the abuse and, most impotantly, the drenching of sweat it will recieve. There are lots of players that will work with Linux, but are there any made for sports? I almost bought one of those Nike PSplay ones but they stopped making them and they were pricey.
I bought a Samsung MP3/CD player and I think it works quite well. It was cheap, too, around $70. It can play a full 700MB of MP3 on CD with 120 second anti-shock. Not really too suitable for 8 miles of running, but good for something like a bumpy car ride. Never had any problems, and you can burn .mp3's to a CD. Even if you have something else on the CD, the player will skip it. You can use whatever CD writing program, whatever CD media, whatever OS. I'm happy...
iPod, plain and simple. Yes, you may find similar devices with large capacities for less money. But you will also find yourself with an ugly headache. And its Unix compatible :)
http://www.apple.com/ipod
They don't skip. Honest. I have tried both panasonic and sony offerings. The sony g-protected I found to be superior, but make sure it has a line out in addition to the headphone jack. I have a great little case that keeps it secure in my hand while I run. I took back the regular sony one because it didn't have line out. I believe the car version does, but they don't sell it in Canada. car mp3 cd Remember make sure it has line out. Then all you need is a burner windows or linux. I hear the usb memory players still take ages to load ( 10 mins ) whats the big deal about 5 minute burn for 200 songs? then you also havea CD player to boot!
Try the riovolt sp100 or sp250(with built in radio). Cd based so no issues with unix/linux, 2 minute skip protection for the sp100 and 8 for the sp250
There IS linux support for the Creative Nomad/D.A.P. jukebox: http://www.df.lth.se/~triad/krad/gnomad/
There are DRM problems with the NetMD line. The software it comes with will only allow you to "check out" an MP3 file onto 4 MDs. If you want to put it on another disc, the software makes you "check in" the file and delete it from another disc. There's also no way to transfer files back from the MD player. Ironically, Sony calls this DRM-ridden software OpenMD!
An open source alternative is being developed. Unfortunately, since Sony is using their Magic Gate encryption scheme in the NetMD protocol, it looks unlikely that a fully functional open alternative will ever exist. The last I checked, they were looking at transfering the files via the analog out and using the protocol to do file naming and recording start/stop.
It's unfortunate that Sony took such a user-hostle approach to this MD player. Had there been less restrictions on the NetMD line I would have gladly purchased one.
Everything you need to know about getting the iPod to work under linux.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
lame --r3mix
Though I haven't tried myself (no need), I'm almost positive that there was an ability to import winamp lists in iTunes
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You do know that the GTA3 radio stations are just MP3 files to begin with, right?
Is this true of the PlayStation 2 version as well?
Check out your GTA3 sounds directory.
Can you do this with the PS2 version?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Stay home and get yourself One o' these systems from thinkgeek.
Realistically, go w/ the Rio 600.
At any rate, I can't believe you seriously said the words geek and sex in the same paragraph.
Running while listening to music is quite unsafe -- if you are tuned out of your surroundings, you can't hear cars, other people, weird animals, any or all of which pose a potential serious threat to you, depending where you do most of your running..... If you can't get through 8 miles without music, try varying the length and route of your runs to keep things interesting, or grab a running buddy to talk/pace with, rather than endangering yourself.
another runner
How did you get scored "off topic"?? I would have scored you totally correct and on-topic. But then again, I'm not a lame slashdot moderator....don't get me started....
Why would you want a bigger MP3 player??
ôó
Ever think of getting a second hand b/w ipaq (3135 or something) pc sleeve, and toshiba 2gig or 5gig hard drive? same drive as the Ipod (5gig), you end up with a pocket computer (I refuse to call these things PDA's) and an ogg player
Plus as for skipping, you can allocate up to 16 meg worth of buffering and the drive can handle a 4 foot drop while in motion, so it isn't going to happen, and yes I've run with it. (battery would probably last longer than an ipod as you could underclock the device and it'd still play well, plus you have the expansion battery on the pcmcia sleeve)
in addition to this, if you wanted to, you could run a flavor of linux on it if you wanted ( http://handhelds.org )
I just fixed your title. This is the Slashdot audience, remember? :)
Have you tried kayopectate?
Info on the Frontier Labs Nex II here
Quick reasons why:
1. CF and Microdrive support
2. No proprietary software, just drag and drop files
3. Works on windows and Linux
4. Cheap
5. Great battery life
6. No DRM crap
7. Customer service that actually writes back (unlike SonicBlueBalls)
You can always go with the Zaurus. It has a built in mp3 player. It is linux based but will cost you around 350$ + a decent CF card (50$).
Works with Linux or anything that has an ftp client...heck, even DOS
Just got one myself. $80 at overstock.com, includes 16MB of compact flash. 128 MB is $35 on PriceWatch.com, and (apparantly) $40 on eBay. Oh, you wanna know what it does? =^)
It plays MP3s, plus records movies, plus takes pictures. Color LCD shows ID3 tags, and can play back the movies and pictures. Movies can be as long as will fit in the card. Technically does well at everything, except that the sensor is crap, so the movies are low quality. On the other hand, they're recorded at 20 fps (very smooth) and it's cool to be able to listen to music, then switch over and grab a movie clip. You can delete one to make room for the other.
Uses standard Type I compact flash. It's too small for IBM's micro drive, but flash is cheap nowadays. And if you have a notebook, you can get a PCMCIA adapter, and move stuff on and off very fast, and drivers are already built into everything. If not, you can prolly get a PCMCIA reader cheap that works with Linux.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Actually, my Rio 300 is great on batteries. Really, the best way to go is to invest $8 on a pair of NiMH rechargable AA batteries to rotate in your MP3 player. A good charger will cost you $20 on top of that. Sounds like a lot, but you're actually saving a ton in the long run. A Rio only uses 1 AA; charge 2 at a time, so when one runs out, you've still got the other! It's also nice that you don't have to throw them out. NiMH's hold their charge for a pretty decent amount of time, can be recharged up to 1,000 times without the "charge memory" problems inherent with the older NiCad batteries, and really perform well in devices like MP3 players (at least as good as alkalines!) With a "smart" 1-hour charger, you can charge a battery up in less time than it takes to run the other one down. I think it's the only way to go.
I have a Diva 224W - it is a CF based player with internal memory. I have the 224W - it has 224 MB of internal memory, and will accept any type 1 CF card. It has a USB connection, and uses the USB mass storage protocol. Really cool. The firmware is upgradeable, and are doing some really good work. It also has a voice recorder. Power is from one AA battery, and with ear buds gives about 6 hours of play time (it is listed at 8 hours, but I haven't gotten that yet). It is really small, and one of the lightest players on the market. Check it out at www.mydivaplayer.com
I definitely have to recommend against this player. This device epitomizes the "so close, yet so far" saying. I haven't tried any Linux software with it, but the Windows version is very bass-ackwards, requiring the creation of playlists instead of direct file addition. Likewise, the software is buggy and stalls out on WinXP very frequesntly.
I like the design and usability of the device, though it won't accept my officially supported 64MB Sandisk MMC. The construction is a little suspect with some superficial cracks developing. It also will drain the battery, even if it is in the off position (yes, I used the new firmware).
It is very useful for exercising because of its small size, but for the price, it leaves a lot to be desired. The service and support is a joke as well. This is from Rio/Sonicblue/whatever they are calling themselves these days, so it may or may not be represntative of their other products.
- i fart in your general direction -
I've had the archos jukebox (6000) for about 8 months now. and i must say that thought it is not without flaw, it has fulfilled all my expectations.
first of all... 6 gigabytes... of course you can swap out the included hdd and replace it (but not without voiding the warranty).
second of all.. it's a simple USB hard drive. so it'll work on just about any OS you can toss at it. newer models have usb 2.0, and recording features. but I have been very happy with mine. and since it's a simple usb hard drive, you can store anything u want on it, not just audio. keep a copy of your favorite linux distro on it. backup yer system. whatever
the batteries tend to last me about 5 hours on the average, and i've never had to change them.
of course if u wanna go apeshit there's this thing.
Well, if you really want unix and a cool mp3 player, I would suggest getting a mac and an iPod. Itunes and the iPod are supposed to be great together and OS X is now Unix, which is cool!
SIGFAULT
Love the iPod. I currently have lots of tunes plus 3 unabridged books from Audible.com. The thing even sets a bookmark when you stop listening!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Hothead
and I have been fairly happy with it. The belt clip grabs tightly, and I've never had it fly off my waist.
However, there are a few things about it that I don't care for.
1. It takes some practice to get used to using the buttons while using the case. The Pause/Play, FF, RWD, Stop, and Select buttons are combined onto one "disc". Its very easy to accidentally pause the unit instead of FF'ing to the next song.
2. The included software stinks. I use the Windows Media Player add-on instead. I don't care for it much either, but I've grown accustomed to it.
3. I used to use it with the "rioutil" program on the Linux side of my laptop (dual boot), but it was unreliable. Half of the time the transfer would abort. The software may have improved, but I haven't tried it again for several months.
One advantage of using Media Player is that you can have it convert all of the MP3s to WMP on the fly while uploading to the player. 64k WMP files sound very good compared to 64k MP3s. 64k WMP may not impress audiophiles, but I find it more than adequate for jogging or working out.
As a marathoner, I can tell you right now that a hard drive solution is a bad idea. Even with something as slim as an IPod, you're talking about too much weight bouncing around on some portion of your body -- whether your music skips or not. I doubt the people suggesting that are serious runners. For the last two years, I've used a Nomad II MG. It's smaller than a deck of cards, expandable through cheap SmartMedia cards (64 mb standards, uprades easily to 200+ -- more than enough for a whole marathon) easily fits in the average neoprene runner's packs you get at fitness stores (which protects it from rain unless you fall into a lake) and includes an FM tuner -- a nice benefit if you grow tired of your playlist from being too lazy to change it. Linux software for it is available. (see Nomadness.net) As an added benefit, I've frequently used it's built in mic for recording interviews (I write for a trade pub). Beauty to this is you can take the recordings and store them with word documents on your computer. All in all, I've been thrilled. And it's perfect for running. One possible alternative are the Nike players. Has an armstrap and is built with runners in mind. Only downside to either of the above is lack of Audible.com support, if that matters to you. I personally prefer going to the books on tape rental places, picking up a CD and ripping it to MP3. Cheers, Laz
-Laz
Pros:
Cons:
Since the 6GB were getting rather crowded, and I was looking at a model that could also record data, I bought an Archos Recorder 20GB a few months ago...
Pro:
Cons:
- UI is definetely severely inferior to the
navigation on the PJB (I'll go into that
further down).
- Power: the batteries don't last as long, as
the LiIon battery of the PJB; it's only a
very minor issue -- since I've bought the
Archos, I've replaced its batteries with
digital camera batteries (1900mAh), and since
then battery times are about the same as I
was used to on my PJB
- BIG CON: The Archos just "crashes" about once
a day (I'm using it fairly constantly during
the day, so this is not something just
"interpolated" from one or two crashes...
As a comparison - in over a year, the PJB
crashed some 3 or so times
- usability: It'd be really cool, if the PJB
would remember my "last position" in each
playlist. Either I would need tons of
playlists to make selection better - but
everytime I choose my Queen playlist, it
starts at the first piece, so it'll hardly
ever reach the end of the playlist...
- The included headphones suck...
- The built-in microphone is more a "feature"
than a "microphone"; especially since it
catches a lot of noise from the internal
hard disk spinning up and down regularly.
- While it has a LINE-in, it doesn't have a MIC
in; so I wouldn't need a pre-amplified
Microphone to record...
I AM using the Archos mostly now (but with my trusty PJB ["Koss portaPro"] headphones), since it can hold all my CDs, not just a little selection of it, but I'd wish, that Archos really improves the firmware a good deal further, with software stability and some song navigation and UI improvements coming in first. From my point of view, the following are my main "problems"/"wishes" for an improved GUI (if you think, THESE are important to you, ask Archos to implement them first, or go with some other player):- when I press fast forward, the Archos shouldn't immediately start the next song, but rather display it's info and wait for me to press play again -- or maybe just delay the start a second or two. Motivation: Sometimes I'd like to skip some 3 or four songs ahead within the playlist; right now, that means, press 'forward', wait until the next song is loaded and started, then press forward again, wait for the next song to start,
... -- this only unneccessarily slows down the process, and also costs a good deal of battery life. If it would just display the new song title and then either waits for myself pressing play or just wait for 2-3 seconds to pass without me pressing forward again, it would definetely add to its usefulness... ;-)
- It lacks a feature to skip forward WITHIN an MP3 -- if you use the recorder to record a meeting or something, you might later want to skip to a specific thing within the MP3; but that can only be done by downloading it from the Archos first and using a normal player
- For navigation, it'd be nice to have something similar to the PJBs "previous/next set" or "previous/next disk"; it makes navigation a
lot faster - and when I want to change a tune, I certainly don't want to spend some 15-20 seconds to achieve that, when it could be done more easily in some 3-5 seconds...
;-)
As for the Archos hardware: The PJB might actually be better for jogging, since the PJB has enough memory to store songs for ~10 Minutes, whereas the Archos spins up some 2-3 times in some songs. And the time the disk is spinning is probably the most problematic during running around. (Also, adding some more memory to the system might improve the battery running time some further -- while the additional RAM will eat more battery - it will certainly save a good deal of battery power, if the disk would spin up less often.Note: just choosing "browse" and then select the song you want, works to get you the song, but it breaks the clean playlist behaviour.
For anyone thinking about getting an Archos - it's a nice little toy, but if you compare it's price to other players, either increase the Archos price for the price of higher capacity batteries and better headphones -- or subtract them from the PJB price, since you won't need to spend extra money on those with it...
I just wished, the PJB people had a box, that could also RECORD...
If you go running with a spinning disc, it may create an undesirable gyroscope effect and force you under the wheels of a bus.
- TOS-MK2018GAP GAP - 20 GB 4200 rpm / 13 ms / 1 MB / 2½" 9.5mm / ATA-66 oem
- TOS-MK3017GAP GAP - 30 GB 4200 rpm / 13 ms / 2 MB / 2½" 9.5mm / ATA-100 oem
- TOS-MK4018-GAP GAP - 40 GB 4200 rpm / 13 ms / 2 MB / 2½" 9.5mm / ATA-100 oem
- TOS-MK6021-GAS GAP - 60 GB 4200 rpm / 13 ms / 2 MB / 2½" 9.5mm / ATA-100 oem (Week 33)
Are those the ones you are speaking off ?Be careful.
There's good evidence indicating doing aerobic exercise accompanied by loud music does harm to hearing. Why? Because the large muscle demands for oxygen during aerobic exercise keeps that oxygen away from the fine attenuation muscles of the ear drums. The latter don't attenuate loud noises very efficiently under these conditions, so you put yourself at risk to hearing loss at by listening at even nominally loud levels while engaging aerobic activity.
I'm a bit confused. You say you run 8 miles each day, and then you also say that you use Unix? I think I must be reading something wrong.
mp3 and wma .avi and .mpg .pqa's
GPS
wireless messaging
full web
full email
wap
cel-phone
color display
palm os
I carry my iPod with me everywhere, ever since I first got it. It's only run out of power a couple of times, it sounds great, and it's happy to drive any headphone. Loud, too. It's simply a perfect portable jukebox. I also keep my contacts in there, and with calendars coming in a month or so, it's enough of a PDA for me as well.
iPod is so good, I actually think people who buy something else right now are crazy. The $299 iPod has 5GB (same as mine) and you'll enjoy the hell out of it.
I just bought a 10 gig iPod and the thing keeps on amazing me.
I was wondering if anyone knows of a firewire digital camera which i could connect to my iPod to store photos without connecting to a computer, ie, while i'm on vacaiton, and away from my G$.
From what i undersand, firewire devices are supposed to be able to work with each other even without a computer attached. This may not be true for the ipod, but i believe firewire spec incoperated device to device connections.
Thanks
It's worth noting that you can upgrade the internal hard drive to a larger one. Do a google search and you should find a page on how to do it. A swedish hacker authored the instructions, and also has a page on linux drives for the archos. I can't remember his name, but the instructions are step-by-step and perfectly understandable... your little brother could probably do it.
The short version: You get a regular 9.5mm laptop hard drive, fat32 format it, copy the current firmware (archos.mod), and change out the drive.
I originally had the archos 6000, and I still do... except it's now a 20gig version. Everything works as adverised... it was pretty cool having an archos 20 before it was available in the store.
It may go without saying, but...
woot!
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Running familiar-gpe + 1gb udrive for tunes. :-)
Using my developing version of scream (c-lang version). supports streaming and soon, ogg for the Fraunhofer(sp?) freaks. No, it doesn't cram 20gb into it but you can get a 5gb card at a decent price (rumors of 1gb pcmcia hd's this xmas abound.. based on ipod's use of them). But can you scp your tunes into a ipod/rio/etc. or listen to Radio Paradise
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
Now where have I seen that logo before...
Getting yourself an Archos box allows you to completely replace the stock crappy firmware with a new all-shiny and beautiful GPL-licensed rewritten-from-scratch firmware named Rockbox!
And if you get the Recorder 20GB model, it runs USB2 and functions as a usb-storage device perfectly well under Linux (just get the USB2 patches if you run the 2.4.X series).
That said, I guess Archos isn't the best device for actually *running* with as hard drives are a bit picky about tough bumps.
But it was more difficult with the Rio 800. Things weren't quite as good back then when I bought the player. There's a program called Unix Rio Utillity which uses is a commandline interface to the Rio. It has matured a lot and is now working perfectly.
There's no good GUI available though so I created the Perl Rio Util (prioutil) with Perl and GTK. Works kinda nice, but I haven't had time to update it for some time now.
Ciryon
Im not sure on the compatiblity of mac to linux but its gotta be better than windows to linux. i'd check out ipods.
I will not be trained.
All my music is in .ogg format now. Is there a portable player for that? For my car, I could build one myself (PC104 etc).
Yes, you've probably never heard of it. It's a an MP3/CD player, takes CDs, CD-R, and CD-RW, the sound quality is great, and it never skips. Ever. I've taken this thing on fast bike rides along the Chicago waterfront, bumping over curbs, passing people on the grass, jumping up and down. You can shake it around like a maraca, it doesn't skip. It has upgradeable firmware, is very solidly constructed(I've managed to drop mine quite a few times), and it's cheap- $99 at www.merconnet.com.
While it is nifty and plays great music, is extremely light (at least without the phone) and lasts quite long, the gripe I have with it is the very fragile connection to the phone. Quite frequently, the telephone will slightly bend the connection just long enough to cut off the player. It's really hard to not have it bend - the only thing yet where I get it reliably to work is a shirt pocket, with the mp3 player sticking up. Of course, this also goes wrong if I carry a backpack...
What it is? It's that little clip-on player for phones like the T68, playing on MMC cards. I got it for £27 at a fire sale (though shipping cost me slightly more than that...), but they are usually around $99.
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
I would recommend going for a MP3 CD player. You can write a lot more MP3's to a CD and you can use any CD writer. Most come with at least 50 seconds of cache, which means you won't get a skip whilst jogging unless you bounce hard enough to dislodge the CD!
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
and their reply:
This is a company I would love to deal with, if we could just get the ball rolling in some way. Let's help them make the decision to proceed!
-ac
Use this mobile phone Sony Ericsson p800.
Sure it's not unix, but then you won't have to carry around an extra device, either!
Runs mp3 player, has symbian OS, java, mms, has GPRS, GSM ,Tri Band, 12MB ram and memory stick upgradeable, bluetooth and built in camera.
yeah!
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I picked up for 80 USD a portable CD player made by Emerson. In addition to playing CD-Audio, it plays Mp3 as well as the audio track on AVI and MPEG video. Nice unit, it can handle multiple directories and multiple levels of subdirectories, you can program play order, it scrolls the song title(for Mp3) across the LCD screen... Other Mp3 players may well be better at just playing Mp3s, but this unit is a solid one purchase item for CD and Mp3. It has all the standard ports of a portable CD player such as external power and line out. The one failing though is especially in Mp3 mode it chews through batteries really fast. Other than that, its a great unit. Just look on store shelves where portable CD players are, and look for one made by emerson with a red trimmed top cover.
Anyone seen a nice MP3player with CF, USB connection and FM radio?
.2 MHz fixed intervals on the tuning dial. Which is pretty stupid on this side of the pond.
I have found exactly one MP3 player with a FMradio.
(RCA something.) As I understand it, this unit use "the American way" of FM radio, using
Why doesn't more MP3players come with a small FMchip? It is dirt cheap and great added value, doesn't suck your batteries dry either. Add RDS for the additional "wow"-factor.
And BTW.
Any rumours for players with a USB 2.0 interface?
Dag B
There is a sourceforge project devoted to it, as well as people gathering information.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
I too would suggest the iRiver MP3 CD player. They have stated that they plan to add Ogg Vorbis support in a firmware update. The Rio Volt CD players are the same product. Personally I have a Philips MP3 CD player, but as far as I know it's not upgradable.
I ran two marathons last year, and when you get into the phase of your training where 10 mile runs are you thrice-weekly "short run", you really need something that has quite a bit of storage capacity. Without a number of songs at your disposal, things can get exceedingly repetitive.
I found the iPod to be an excellent companion, and it stood up to running through really lousy Rochester, NY winters over very long distances. The battery life and storage capacity make it perfect for running for hours on end.
The downsides? Not many. It is too slick to grip in your hand without a case, so I'd consider that mandatory. I prefer holding it to putting it on a belt clip, just because the repeatitive up/down motion can be a bit much unless anything you have is well-secured (a beltpack and work well for it).
A port to cover the firewire jack for inclimate weather is useful as well -- they ship with them on newer models now, and you can pick a cover up pretty cheap for older models too.
I have no idea how well it works with brands of Unix other than Mac OS X, though (on OS X, it works perfectly, of course).
Alternatives for mp3 players:
- RAM
- Hard Disk
- mini disc
- CD
RAM based units are annoying...
At 3.5mins & 4.5MB per song 64 MB stores what, 50 minutes of music? How often will the listener get tired of this same set? Me, I would want to swap music after each run.
While the capacity is low, filling the thing with music takes too long. One must go through his collection looking for 14 motivating songs, hooking up all the gear and downloading to the device. This process will take something like 20 - 30 minutes.
So we have 30 minutes of work to maintain each exercise session. Not very efficient.
Due to inherent fragilty, hard disk players are not recommended for athletic use.
Like RAM units Minidisks don't store enough, recording is slow and besides, they're yet another media format.
Therefore, the conclusion for the fitness enthusiast is that CD based mp3 players are the only way to go.
It is agreed that today's best unit is the iriver iMP-350 SlimX. I just bought one for $130 and I love it!
You can use any of a hundred different programs in any OS to burn your mp3 CDs. My current exercise CD has 158 songs or 9.2 HOURS!
It has a FM receiver to tune in gym TVs while on the treadmill.
Another plus of the iriver for us workout geeks is the sweet remote controller. No digging through your pack to hit PAUSE when that gym bunny says "Hi" to you!
Cheers,
Bill
bamph
Looooaaads of space on the 256Mb cards I use. It can take the IBM 1Gb drives, but the battery suffers massively if you do and the USB connection is slow and also sucks loads of battery power, it's definitely worth getting a separate CF reader and using that.
Sometimes you have to re-format new CF disks when you initially get them, apparently some manuacturers don't format them properly.
Oh, the battery compartment sucks. But that's about my only complaint.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
...Works a treat on my 4 mile ride into work each morning. I've bought 4 compact flash cards and put 3-4 albums on each so I always have a huge choice of music... Next stop is the 512MB CF card so I can upload a huge amount of music and leave it running on Random play!
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
this thing? http://www.eisen.co.kr/english/product/mp3_2.htm Anyone got one/used one/recommend one? Seems quite small and cheap... Linux support? P.S. On sale in the UK at Scan: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/mp3.htm
Does iPod support OGG Vorbis?
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
If you can get somebody to bring you one from Japan, get the IOData Exrouge player. It doesn't work with Linux when connected via USB, but it accepts SD/MMC cards which you can write using any USB SD/MMC reader.
It's very small, very light, works extremely well and the interchangeable SD/MMC cards are really useful.
How is this news for nerds?
and my 8 mile runs
Hardly your sterotypical 250lb slob in the basement is it?@
If you buy an MP3 player that uses Compact Flash media it will be compatible with every operating system that has a supported flash reader. I have a Pontis SP600 that can read CF and MMC cards and i successfully use it with Linux and my portable computer with a PCMCIA flash reader.
Beware, the Linux rio500 software has/had a serious bug when used with a 128Mb SmartMedia card, which could result in (permanent) corruption to the device. Last time I checked the dev lists, there didn't seem to be any progress on fixing it (although one person reported that increasing the size of a couple of fields in the code worked).
Also, it is possible to corrupt the device anyway by interrupting transfers (e.g. battery dies). My Rio500 now thinks it has only 26Mb on the internal card. Needless to say, this happened after the warranty expired (and the serial number rubbed off the back of the unit!)
Rio/SonicBlue appeared to stop actively supporting it after firmware release 2.16 (which is well worth installing).
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
It has 128 MB ram which is fine for my purpose. The finish is nice and it came with a nice beltpouch.
What I don't like is the battery. Diamond claim 11 hours of playback. I have never had it play more than 2 hours. Worse is the recharging and the software that tells the battery status.
Some days ago I connected it to the recharger. After 24 hours it was up to 22%. After another 4 hours of recharging it was down to 8%. It's totally f*cked up.
I have send two emails to support but I have never gotten a reply. They seem to ignore me. I'm sending another email to try one more time. After that I will take the thing apart and try to get another rechargeble battery on my own.
Just my 2
I bought one for my wife as a surprise gift. I got it off of Ebay from a guy who sells refurbed units. It was a total of $109 CDN. The catch is twofold; it only has 32M which is expandable to 128M with MMC cards and the warranty was only 3 months. She can fit about 45 minutes on it with 64bit wma which she finds fine but I usually borrow it and use 96bit. It will do MP3 but storage space is less. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the headphones are tinny. I usually bring my Sony ones and then it sounds fine. Also calling Rio you can get the nifty armband. My wife ended up putting on a strap for the bottom of the unit because the unit flops on the band. Otherwise she loves it.
To: 'Ask Google, shit-for-brains.' Thanks for your support.
I used to have a rio500, and that had nice interface for Linux (and *BSD!), but since last year I have been using a pjb100, a hard-disk based machine, that was originally designed by Compaq. It is bigger than an iPOD, but has a 30 gig (and now 40gig) capacity.
It has an active set of projects for Windows, Linux and OSX, so if I had to recommend you a player, this is the one I would go for.
"Watch the skies, keep watching the skies"
My dream audiohardware is a `sony`-like MD-Player, which uses the MD-Disk als normal accessible disk-media. You just put your ogg oder mp3 files on the thing, which of course runs a free OS. Done.
Until this happens you can use Yamdager - For easy and fast titling of very Non-Free customer unfriendly Sony Players.
I forgot to mention that the slimX has 8 minutes of Shock Protection!!! This is much more than any other disc device I've heard of. Bill
bamph
You don't run 8 miles
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Previously the refurbished price for the 5GB iPod was at 299$US, and now all the 5GB iPods have dropped to this price.
With a price of 299$US, a 5GB hard disk and approximately 10 hours of use, you cannot go wrong. In addition to that, xpod has been created for use as a linux client for the ipod.
As of yet, support for Ogg Vorbis has not been created, but once it has, you will be sure to see it at http://www.ipodhacks.com
-David
... was a portable CD player that can also read MP3s burned to a CD-R. Versatile, holds tons, and CDRs are cheap. I even use it as a stereo in my car (6v electricals, a "proper" radio for my car would cost lots) with some cheap un-powered PC speakers.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I personally like the sony net md palyers (Mini Disc). The cheap one is only $150 and one 80 minute disc($3) can hold about 5 hours of songs in mp3 format. Also one double A battery can run the thing for around 50 hours. It connects using USB and I don't know about Linux support but the player itself is great. Very durable. Mine never skips.
dude, you're going to make yourself sick. that's too much unless you're training for some type of competition.
I don't know of a good linux mp3 player but would advise you to run a bit less, about 1/2 of that should keep you in fine shape. I've know of "distance runners" who developed heart problems fro it.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
The frame still has a constant rate, it just allows some of the data to be re-used, reducing IO, not bit rate.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Actually, that's same quality at lower bitrates, or better quality at same bitrates. This is a good thing. Lower sizes for the space impaired, and better sound for the audiophiles.
Now, if something portable could play it...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Ive been using a nomad iic for a while now its been to europe with me... it held out better than i did. Anyway thought i would mention. You can now buy a nomad iic with 128 MB on board.. and capable of takeing another 12 meg flash card... which is what i would suggest for running, something that has NO MOVING Parts. also it supports WMA format... which i can tell the difference on my computer or piped throgh my home receiver... but on my nomad it is difficult to tell the difference... So i think i have like 64 songs on a 128 meg flash card with rooom for more..
I highly recomend this one...
O yeah and if you get tired of the mp3/wma's you can always use the fm tuner that is built in.
not to mention its really light
I own a CD player, CD/MP3 player, tape player, and an MP3 player (Archos 6000, ~2 years now).
For working out, especially outdoor running, stick with the good old-fashioned tape player. I haven't found anything that works as well, has the same battery life, and is as cheap. Overall, the tape player *is* the best value.
Having said that, second place goes to the Archos, though I still can't take it for runs outside (it will skip after a while). Also, my Archos tends to incur buffer underrun because I use 320kb/s MP3's.
Does anyone have any experience with the Terapin Mine? I have been looking at it as a portable MP3 player, and a good place to dump my wife's digital pictures, etc. Info is at http://www.terapintech.com/fea_mine.html
The Pros:
The Cons:
To summarize, if you are looking to purchase an MP3 player for your runs, I would not recommend the HipZip. Other players are lighter, smaller, and offer more storage than this unit.
I imagine they use the same technology, if my memory serves me, the copyright notice says its licenced in the PS2 version. I don't think it would be economical to use a differant compression technology for the same game on a differant platform.
Yes it would. If Sony is willing to license its ATRAC3 codec (used in MiniDisc LP decks) to PS2 game developers cheaper than Thomson Multimedia is willing to license MP3 technology for a video game, but Sony is not willing to license ATRAC3 for use in PC software, then you bet developers will re-encode their wav files into ATRAC3 for the PS2 version and MP3 for the PC version.
In addition, platform limitations may come into play. The NES supported only one codec for samples, a simple predictive codec, at a few specific bitrates. The GBA is more flexible (with ability to play PCM from RAM; thus, ability to decompress in real time), but it still has only a 16 MHz processor. I've read that ATRAC and ATRAC3 are less complex to decode than MP3, which could conceivably free the PS2's vector units to process more triangles instead of audio samples.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've got the 10GB Nomad, and use it exclusively under Linux. I use the NJB Filesystem, but have also used
GNOMAD successfully.
I believe that njbfs works under *BSD as well.
I have a NEX II with 256 meg CF card and I use it while biking. It truely is tiny. As seen here. Slashdot did a article on it here. It also can support IBM Microdrives. It has never skipped for me and the battery life is great(15 hours as advertised). It also plays WMA files and VBR MP3 without a problem. It has support for lists, but it stinks(because you have to set it on the device and it does not save them after power off) so I use the RANDOM play feature. IT also has preset Tuning for BAss/Treble/etc, and you can do custom seting if wanted.
Downside to it is that the amp in it is not all that powerful, but thats fine since I use it only with headphones and not as a standalone player.
CS majors, we are the geeks that run it all. Without us things die.
The PJB-100 would be my pick
1. It comes standard with *mature* support for Linux using USB.
2. The battery lasts for well over 12 hours.
3. Unlike many other players, it has a REMOVABLE Li-Ion battery. The battery is not permanently sealed inside the unit.
4. The Linux software allows you to edit your playlists using your favorite text editor.
5. Includes 40GB of storage
6. The user interface uses a simple paradigm that is very easy to use.
7. The LCD screen is huge and easy to read
8. Unlike Archos and Rio (which seem to have an abnormally high number of reliability complaints) the PJB-100 is a quality unit.
9. Sound quality: Probably one of the best sounding MP3 portables.
10. *NOT* SDMI Compliant!
11. Comes with a great collection of goodies standard in the box: Great sounding Koss headphones (not some crappy earbuds), leather carry case, car power adapter, etc.
I bought mine at http://www.mp3factorydirect.com/ and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good Linux compatible MP3 player.
Am I the only one here that likes the RioOne? It's cheap, it's easily expandible using SmartMedia Flash memory (currently using 128MB Flash ROM), and it is a USB mass storage device using VFAT file system -- load the USB mass storage and appropriate SCSI drivers in your kernel, just mount the thing as another device on your filesystem, and use your favorite file manage to move MP3 files back and forth.
Simple... BUT THIS INFORMATION WAS A DOUBLE-BITCH TO FIND IN THE FIRST PLACE! Why isn't there easy-to-find documentation on how to hook up various MP3 players to Linux? You'd think it was a deep, dark secret known only to '3l33t haX0rs' or something!
---dragoness
--r3mix has been proven to be far inferior to --alt-preset standard under nearly all types of music by double-blind testing both by the folks at hydrogenaudio.org and ff123.net. It used to be a pretty good preset, but there's no reason to use it anymore. Part of the reason is that --r3mix is just a preset for a bunch of command-line switches, whereas --alt-preset has code-level tweaks to optimize things like joint-stereo handling.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
i love my rio one, usb mass storage, vfat, i have a 128 meg cf card and 32 internall, lets me load about 3 hours of music, runs about 10 hours on one AA battery, i take it out skateboarding all the time, handles shocks well. Only problems is that you cant manipulate the playlist, and on my original rio the solder connection for the wire running between the battery harness and the circuit board came loose.. not a problem if you can solder. the newer one doesnt use a wire there though, just a spring coil so there isnt even that problem.. about the only thing you could do to break it is crack the lcd.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I have had this for about a year now, bought it 2nd hand. The one problem they ALL face is that the inline remote/lcd unit sucks and WILL stop working properly. Know that. But it doesnt stop this from being the king MP3 player for sport/running. Its small, lightweight, but best of all comes with an arm strap, so you strap it to your upper arm and forget its there. It comes with 128MB (64 built in and a 64MB MC card) memory.
Software-wise, the BEST interface I have found for this is iTunes on OSX. It comes with a proprietary management app for Win and Mac, but this thing SUCKS. iTunes works very well. There is also a plug-in for Windows Media Player, if you want to venture to the dark side.
There is a linux interface as well, although I must admit, I have had problems with it. You need rioutil for the base interface and there are a few front ends you can layer over that. I dont find that the rioutil interface is perfect, because it often uploads songs to the player, yet the player cant play them for some reason.
Anyway, if its sport-ability you want, this is the player for you. Takes on AA battery, lasts about 8 hours on this.
bought the Nex II to replace the Rio 500, but haven't yet.
anyway the Nex II sucks. It feels very flimsy and cheap compared to the Rio 500, and the controls are horrible, music stops whenever you want to adjust the EQ and dozens of other nuisances that don't exist with the Rio 500.
As for the Rio 500 not working on XP I don't know what you're talking about. I have XP Pro and the software I downloaded for the Rio a year ago still works just fine in XP. Perhaps you just need to update your drivers. There's also about a dozen other programs that work as well, try Sveta Portable Audio.
I wonder why everyone is suggesting hard drive based units to a guy who wants to run 8 miles with it. Maybe the iPod would be fine, but the rest of the hd mp3 players seem too large and bulky to run 8 miles while carrying or having it hang off you.