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Portable CD-R/RW/MP3 Player?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-all-of-your-music-discs-with-you dept.

Eldie asks: "My ancient (1995) portable CD player has finally rolled over and died. I'd like to replace it, and I'm not looking for something as grand (read: expensive) as an iPod. I'd like to have something a bit more useful than the baseline -- it should at least play CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs and MP3s. It would be great if there was some sort of useful hierarchical MP3 interface so that I didn't simply end up having to skip back and forth through 100 tracks, 1 track at a time. Is there anything out there that fits the bill?" This was touched on almost 3 years ago, where quite a few of you had useful recommendations. Three years is a long time, however, and it would be interesting to note if there are any better (or cheaper!) options out there. If you were to look for such a player, today, what would you buy?

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Sony Walkman by mlafranc · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have a Sony CD Walkman D-NE510 here in my hand, it works well, plop your mp3s on a cd in a folder all to themselves, stick it in, and close the lid.

    Some notes: It will play on a pair of NiCD AA batteries seemingly forever, the advertised battery life is 18hrs playing MP3s, so I guess thats good enough.

    Problems:
    1. I've noticed skipping when playing VBR mp3s on batteries... I think the player is VBR agnostic, so it runs out of frames to play and haves to spin up the disc out of powersave to get more the track, if this bothers you, don't do VBR or something I guess.

    2. Like I said, battery life is awesome, but not in -30 something degrees weather, like we had here a few weeks back, I had to do the public transportation thing, and it dropped out a few times, I had to press stop, play, stop, open the lid, close the lid, whatever to get it to work, and this meant taking off my gloves, which sucks because it's freaking cold!

    Also, I must be spoilded, because I want a backlight! How can I see what track I've selected when I live in eternal darkness heh.

    Good stuff:

    The battery life, like I said, and those batteries are two AA's, not something wierd like a lithium ion sealed inside the case or 3 AAA's burining a hole in my wallet, because I only have AA rechargables, and throw away batteries cost less to buy, but more to use.

    Damn near impossible to make it skip, you can shake it, drop it, whatever, of course I've been gentle to it, but it's nice.

    Quick tip:

    Name your files like this:

    AlbumFolder/01Title of Song.mp3

    It'l show up as 01Title or 02ABCDE, you get 7 characters in folder display, so if they all look like "08 U2 -" then that would kind of suck. It shows scroling tag info, Title, Album, Artist, Track #, Bitrate, Time played, press the display button to rotate through them.

    Good lick picking your player, I really do like this player, two flaws ain't half bad.

    The ATRAC support may also be a flaw, since I don't give a damn about SONY's propritary crap, but it isn't a flaw, because you don't have to use it, MP3s work just fine.

    I recharge the batteries about once every two or three weeks, not bad.

    When I'm not lazy, I plug it in to an ac adapter, it didn't come with one, but It's 4.5 Volts, and you can get the correct head to stick on one of those multi voltage A/C adapters from rat shack.

  2. My recommendations would be... by deja206 · · Score: 5, Informative
    I think the last one looks pretty geeky!