"oryoki2000" <> wrote:
> Players that use a hard disc can store 6, 20 or even 40 gigabytes of
> MP3s.
60 and 80 GB is normal for portables these days..
> Flash memory players are limited to 1GB or 2GB.
You can get players holding 4, 6 and even 8 GB memory now.
> Flash memory players have none of these limitations. They are
> smaller, lighter, and use battery power more sparingly
> than Hard Disc players.
That's not entirely true. The more memory, the higher the
usage of power, and the higher the chance that a HD player
actually uses less. HD players are getting smarter in
using less and less power by rarely accessing the disk
and caching with small (and low power) amounts of memory.
Add to that the low power engines and you'll see that
with most "flash" or memory players having their chips
powered on at all times during access, they use about the same.
The only obvious difference is the needed Voltage-level;
for just memory-chips you'll need less than with a disk.
> It's unusual to find an MP3 player with battery life shorter than 15
> hours,
Most iPods from before the iPod photo, actually.
> Most players use some sort of battery that is not replaceable.
One can in fact find replacements for most,
just be sure you can open your player yourself
and with care, and know where to get
the correct replacement battery.
Look in the forums of the brand of your player,
or check out rockbox.org
> As you might guess, Sony makes the players that understand both
> ATRAC and MP3.
You can also rename the atrac files to have extension .MP2
chances are high that most brands will play them just fine,
depending on what ATRAC type is used.
> 7. Why not Hi-MD?
>
> A Hi-MD disc can hold 1GB, which is 800 or more 30-second tracks. A
> second disc costs about $7. Using SonicStage software, MP3 files can
> be organized in your bird sound library, and converted for use with
> the Hi-MD machine.
It's always a bad idea converting from a lossy compressed format
to another. At least use the PCM format on the Hi-MD in that case.
You might also want to make sure your player supports
Ogg Vorbis playback, since it's a much better quality codec
than most others in the same bitrate ranges;
http://www.maresweb.de/listening-tests/mf-128-1/results.htm
http://forum.hardware.fr/hardwarefr/VideoSon/MP3-WMA-AAC-OGG-qualite-kbps-e=
valuation-sujet-84950-1.htm
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=3D35438
etc.
One important thing you left out is the actual playback quality
of the audio. I can recommend the iriver players for that,
they have sublime EQ-options that makes any connected
headphone sound the way it should. Many iriver players
also have good Ogg Vorbis support:
http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/ultra/t30/T30-1GB.aspx
A good idea is to look at how many users own the brand/model
you might want to buy, look how widely supported it is
on, for example http://forums.rockbox.org/
which gives a very good indication of how long
it will keep being a functional player.
Good luck,
Julius
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