[parkbench]

Dissing FLACs isn't 'like' dissing lossless audio. It is dissing lossless audio.

FLACs are fine if you have a terabyte hard drive and you're an audiophile and such.

Otherwise, unless it's poorly encoded, the (average) human ear really can't discern the quality beyond a good 192kbps mp3.

FLAC is pointless for portable mp3 players because it's huge.

It's a noble effort and may have some uses, but certainly not for a portable whatever.

Also: forgot to mention where/how often I listen to my player. Surprisingly, I actually don't listen to music as much at home anymore. I would like to change this but this is largely due to three reasons:

1) I'm on ventrilo a lot, so if I play music, it's annoying to have to talk over it or constantly pause it.

2) Because of #1, even when I'm not on ventrilo I often just forget to put something on.

3) Sometimes I just like reading things in silence. If I'm focusing on reading and comprehending an article, I don't want to get caught up in the beauty/lyrics/etc. of a song.

I used to use it a lot during school. Otherwise, long trips, train/plane rides, and other compulsory ventures.
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metafilter vs. youtube comments

[taidan]

no portabke player of any sort, but I just got out of college and never had that much to spend on one (and ipods were too expensive as gifts) so that is my excuse. Now that I'm out of school and have a real job, I'm going to buy...something. I'm not sure if I should just save up and get something good, or just buy a Shuffle with my first check. Someone on SB once talked about using a shuffle and throwing two or three albums on it and just listening to them all week, and that sounded kind of appealing to me.

[108]

Do what I do!

Get an iPod Shuffle, make a big playlist of songs you like in iTunes (if you're one of those people who pretends to hate iTunes, please get over it), arrange the songs in alphabetical by artist, tell the iPod Shuffle to just import songs from that one playlist, and then carry that around. You can fit about 150 songs on there, and it's very easy to update the playlist -- cut tracks, add new tracks.

Import the whole playlist unshuffled into the iPod Shuffle, and then put it on shuffle mode when you're out listening to music. When you hear a song by a band and you think, hey, I could go for some more of that, just switch the iPod back into non-shuffle mode, because you've conveniently arranged the songs in alphabetical by artist. Likewise, if there's a band you want to hear, just put the iPod on shuffle and shuffle until you get to something alphabetically close to the band you want to hear. It's pretty simple!

And the shuffle is morbidly tiny, as well. So there you go.

Also: this is a pretty terrible topic title.
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[Quick Shot II Turbo]

mpio SOLID / HD400



Basic info:
# 8GB micro hard drive (i.e. not flash)
# QCIF 1.8” TFT-LCD
# Playback support for MP3, WMA, ASF and OGG
# ~10 hours of playback
# Output 18mW
# 52×93 x 15 mm
# 3.5mm line in jack for audio recording (I have never used this)
# FM tuner

+ direct USB connection and access to files, no bloatware needed. Can also be used to carry files around, if need be
+ OGG support is nice, as I have some files in that format
+ not clunky
+ buttons! No touchy-feely BS, buttons!
+ decent UI
+ 2 games: a twitchy bejeweled clone and a very twitchy Afterburner clone, both complete with Engrishy storylines and both completely unplayable
+ charges via USB
+ ~10 hours playtime is OK for me.
+ FM tuner, video player and picture viewer are there, but...

- ...they're not very good
- output is low
- 2 second skip between every track
- my first one broke after half a year, headphone port had problems
- the current firmware is buggy; playback of bass-heavy tunes creates very subtle distortion in the sound if the screen is switched off (!). I hate this bug, even though it's only audible with pure bass
- firmware is not updated frequently enough
- some mp3s files do not play, but I have never bothered to check out why. Probably something to do with the way the files were encoded. This happens rarely
- fairly steep pricepoint

It's a fairly poor player, really, but I couldn't live without direct access and hasslefree filetransfering.
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[rabite gets whacked!]

Yeah, I've still got one of those Sony MD things floating around, from before they even adopted digital transfers. It was the first generation of that whole LP2/4 thing. The internal battery's toast, but the external still works fine (and yeah, battery life is incredible). It helps to just think of it as tapedeck mkII.

It was wonderful for recordings, too.

[L]

Thank you, person who renamed this topic.

[Hot Stott Bot]

Guys, that is the coolest looking retro-vintage mp3 player I've ever seen.

[dark steve]

dang a gear setting for metal cassettes?

how seriously bad is that thing

[Hot Stott Bot]

I want to rip out the guts of one and replace it with something actually useful because it is so awesome but I don't want to because it is so awesome.

[boojiboy7]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

I (rarely) use an ancient CD-based mp3 player, the various difficulties of which I was going to brag about until I realized that you guys have obviously dealt with worse.

I will say that I'm still holding out for someone to hack together a portable device that approximates Winamp/XMPlay/whatever and allows me to play mod/XM/IT/etc and emulated music files without having to convert them to mp3s first. I realize this is absurdly unlikely to ever happen, but hope springs eternal!
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[Hot Stott Bot]

[Daphaknee]

[Hot Stott Bot]

:hipster:

Also why the hell would you listen to CDs when you could listen to FLACs, lol.

[Daphaknee]

I started a record label that would only release on Mini Disc because we were trying to be the most pretentious experimental people in the bay area.
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the internet's

[Hot Stott Bot]

Beign the most pretentious only works when your pretentions are founded on some kind of logic though.

[Daphaknee]

no not really, we were pretty much just making fun of snooty noise musicians by pretending that you can only get the truest clearest sound out of a minidisc

nothing is better than a minidisc
you can flush a minidisc down the toilet and still listen to it
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the internet's

[Hot Stott Bot]

Has anyone made a portable headphone tube amp yet?

Now that would be pretentious.

Shit.

That's gotta be possible.

[psiga]

[psiga]

[PianoMap]

[parkbench]

I dunno. There's something about horse and carriages that I like.
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metafilter vs. youtube comments

[!=]

Repeat thread!



I dig my minidisc mz-rh1 a lot. Audio quality is peerless and it has unmatched audio recording capabilities for an audio player. Rather inexpensive media ($2/gb) and great battery life. (I still own an ipod mini however its battery is toast, and this makes it useless in the field)

I sometimes hook it up to an actual amplifier, by virtue of its line out, and compined with lossless recordings, it provides really impecable sound.

Downsides: sonicstage. sonicstage and sonicstage. Others might lament the rather blind remote.



When I feel too lazy for sonicstage, I just use my phone which has TERRIBLE audio quality. I'm talking 1980s tape hissing quality. And it's a $700 phone. (Or if I feel like gaming, the DS which has bad quality audio as well, just a bit more digital-crappy and less hiss-happy) However synchronization is dead easy, just drag+drop files to the device either wireless or through usb.

So, minidisc for albums and recording, or long term vacations. Phone for podcasts, crappy mp3s or just random playlists. The phone plays videos additionally. For both I use sennheiser's px200 unless I want to wear a hat. Those headphones have great quality, really dampen the external sound, though produce a bit too much bass. However they are a bit hard to fit on one's ear.



And for music making on the road, a monomachine, with ok headphones such as sennheiser's hd200.

[psiga]

[Teflon]

[!=]

I confirm moonshell on the DS it does. (Plays mp3, mod + xm + it, basically everything mikmod supports)

However:
- sound quality is rather average/bad
- no playlist capabilities
- it crashes occasionally
- the DS is a bit too big for an audio player unless you carry it inside a bag

[Hot Stott Bot]

I'm pretty sure rockbox on an ipod could do all that?

[Hot Stott Bot]

[Kipple]

[oneEIGHTkevin]

Man I got into hi-fi audio a while back and you can do a few things to dramatically improve your iPod's sound. Simply using a tiny headphone amplifier with the line-out ability of your iPod makes it a lot better. Using line-out over the headphone out just opens up frequences that would regularly become muddy through the iPod's headphone port. For a while I was using this set up:



Which is a 5th gen iPod video with an iBasso headphone amp I got from some chinese dude. The amp is mediocre itself but I think the act of using the line-out instead improved the sound a lot. Not too expensive to set this up either. And you will definitely benefit from using lossless formats with this set up or atleast hi-bitrate mp3s, etc.

I used this for a while but couldn't be bothered to carry extra shit around with my iPod so I simply upgraded to another DAP:



I admit this DAP is probably one of the most pretentious things I've ever bought. It's a Kenwood HD30GB9 and it's expensive. Around $400 dollars imported but it has a quality digital amplifier built in and a super clean headphone out. It only holds 30gb of music and doesn't support many codecs. WAVs are easy to transcode into the Kenwood lossless format but I mostly use high bitrate mp3s myself. I just don't have confidence in my music actually being recorded in enough quality to justify lossless sound. I mostly listen to older jazz and hip hop and it's compressed enough as it is so fuck it.

Anyways I'm glad I ditched the iPod in the end as its problems became apparent after I tried other DAPs.
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[oneEIGHTkevin]

[Hot Stott Bot]

Oh god I want it.

[psiga]

Those are definitely not pocket-sized. They do look really fucking nice, though. I was about to be impressed, but that shot doesn't show the power brick.

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=214837

Evidently those are not portable.

HOWEVER, evidently they sound really good for the price (for a desk amp which is, again, not portable).

Edit: Also, that Kenwood DAP looks really interesting... Integrated amp circuitry is a nice thing indeed.
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[rabite gets whacked!]

Got the Zen Stone Plus, in red.

It's nearly identical in size and weight to the original Stone (a tiny bit heavier and wider, a barely noticeable difference), with the little circular display in the open space to the left of navigation controls.
so pluses:

+ 2GB w/ display, $70.
+ Very small & lightweight; shirt pocket portable, light enough to hang free from in-ear buds without dislodging them.
+ Shows up as an external harddrive, drag and drop files w/ no software required
+ FM Radio
+ Voice recording
+ Clock and date
+ Stopwatch?
+ Shortcut switch (mine's set to the go the recording feature)
+ Charges through USB or AC
+ Plenty of play mode options
+ Option to flip the display 180 degrees

minuses:
- No included AC adapter, won't charge while hooked up to a hibernating laptop (or, in my case, one with general power issues)
- Browsing through folders automatically starts playing whichever is selected; you can't continue listening to a song while looking for the next.
- Can't dig into a folder to browse individual songs; automatically starts at the beginning of the folder, and you have to page through in sequence with the navigation buttons.
- While in shuffle mode, the browse mode also shuffles, so trying to scroll down the folders will bring you to random ones instead.
- If you don't select a folder while in browse mode (as in, click the button, even though that folder's already started to play automatically), the player will automatically display the clock rather than turning the display off.
- Menus don't loop; you have to scroll from one end to the other.

So yeah, they could really fix the biggest problems here by tinkering with the UI issues. Give the ability to browse without auto-playing, and to select specific tracks, and it'd be nearly perfect.
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[Martial Loh]

hey rabite, is there now an AC plug? or are Creative selling a usb to mains thingy?

I'm holding off on gettting the zen stone plus just now..just in case they announce an even cooler version next month!

[Touran]

I just bought a Zen V Plus 2GB.

It's pretty much what I wanted in a player and for only $80. Of course, the screen is really too tiny to take advantage of the videoplayback function.
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Man, I'm sorry.

[rabite gets whacked!]

[Touran]

I totally agree with you on Creative's new products.
The picture and video quality are pretty surprising all told.

My only complaint are the headphones packaged with the players; buds fall out of my ears all the time and it gets really annoying having to reposition them constantly.

I'm probably going to get some clip-on setup or something.
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Man, I'm sorry.

[Martial Loh]

i use the headphones that came in the Zen Vision M accessory pack.. They block out about 50% outside noise, so I can just about hear announcements on the London Underground, without hearing Joe Blogg's stupidly loud tinny headphone rendition of David Bowie's Lets Dance.

I might pick up the Zen stone plus when they stock it in my local HMV....then pass down my current stone to my student brother..

I've got so many USB cables now its ridiculous! Only a few seem to work with my portable hard drive though..