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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 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.
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.
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
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.
But there is iPod for Linux.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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 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.
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
http://www.mydivaplayer.com/
Cheap, long battery life, and doubles as a compact flash reader!
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 ..!
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.
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.
Just here to add my support for the NEX II. I was actually swayed by the fact that it *didn't* come with any on-board memory, letting me use whatever size CF card I want. The USB transfer is a little slow, but as other posters have pointed out, using a different CF reader will solve that. If you want a tiny player with good sound quality get the NEX II. You can't go wrong.
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.
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.
Second that on the Rio Volt / iRiver players. They work with every single samplerate + bitrate combo, understand UDF (if you're so inclined), are very durable, flashable, and pretty much universally available. The software is well-designed (esp. the latest versions) and isn't impeded by the bugginess that many other players on the market exhibit. Sound quality is above-par, with the only real audible flaw being that the original (IMP-100 / Volt SP100) has a relatively weak amplifier.
The NexII can be fussy about the CF cards you feed it - branded ones are a good idea. Don't be tempted to flash it up to the 1.42 firmware unless you actually NEED to - Frontier Labs pulled it from their site for a damn good reason (namely that it bites). Stick with 1.4 or thereabouts.
Also note that the current versions of the NexII firmware will list and play back mp3s/WMAs in the order they were written to the CF card, so copy them in the "right" order - if you're a Windows addict, my little utility called copynex will copy files across in sensible order - I'm assuming linux users can figure out their own solution (shell/perl scripting, rewriting their OS to copy files in the desired order, etc.) ;-)
actually for less money you can get a solid state 1GB CF card that will drain your batteries at least 40-50% slower. It also has 0% chance of being ruined by mechanical shock. After seeing those pictures of the guy from ground 0's D30 and then seeing the pictures recovered from his CF card I have figured out that CF is basically indistructable.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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