birding-aus

Re: iPod for Birding

To: "Russell Woodford" <>
Subject: Re: iPod for Birding
From: "Dave Torr" <>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:15:11 +1000
One other issue (which I think is against iPods) is the battery used. My
(pre iPod) Archos uses standard AA batteries, which are readily available
everywhere. I guess that an iPod may prove a little difficult on long
camping trips where there is a lack of electricity to charge the thing - and
I recall that spare batteries for it are rather expensive. I also have a
small Samsung player which again uses a AAA battery (and my camera also uses
AA - Iearnt the hard way about non standard batteries on ling trips!)

On 26/07/06, Russell Woodford <> wrote:

A little advice for anyone considering one of the many iPod
lookalikes ....  choose carefully, especially if you want to use the
device to access individual birdcalls from a big playlist quickly.  I
don't know much about the branded competitors, such as iRiver,
Sandisk, Creative, Sony etc.  I'm guessing they are probably fairly
easy to use and have similar features to the real iPods.

The ones to be wary of are the Chinese or Hong Kong clones.  I
recently bought one of these, and I'm happy with it as a tiny nano-
sized MP3 player (it has a radio, voice recorder, and plays movies as
well!) but it doesn't use the same menu system as a real iPod, and
the "clickwheel" isn't!  It just has a 5-way toggle switch so it is
impossible to fast-forward or rewind within tracks.  It's also rather
clumsy moving between tracks.  Mine has 4 gigabytes of storage, and
all the Australian birdsongs CDs I have easily fit onto this tiny
player, leaving plenty of room for voice recording in the field, and
for hundreds of songs   - all for under $100.  BUT it is fairly
useless for locating a specific track quickly, so won't be much good
for helping me check birdsong in the field.  You get what you pay for.

I think for serious use  -i.e. quick access to recordings in a huge
playlist - the players with hard drives still perform a lot better
than the Flash memory models.

Russell Woodford


===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com

To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 
===============================

===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 
===============================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU