| #710 |
|
2004 |
Perilous 710 Not much time for music this week so I’ll address one of the questions I get asked reasonably often these days – which is, what portable MP3 player do you recommend? Actually, to tell the truth, I don’t have an MP3 player. The closest thing I have is a portable CD player that plays MP3s from data CDs which I picked up for about $80 whilst waiting for a connecting flight in Osaka last year. Its an old Panasonic model which doesn’t sound too bad for the price, but is nothing special. At least it handles all bitrates including variable bitrates and doesn’t complain about other files being on the data disk as well (images etc) like some more expensive CD/MP3 players do. The good thing with a CD/MP3 player is that for someone like me that doesn’t have time to encode everything – nor the desire to – it is a good middle ground, and one that isn’t too unfamiliar given that I’ve been walking with a portable CD player for years now. However I do have a bit of experience with both an iPod and some other competing devices. Apple’s iPod is vying to be what the Sony Walkman was in the early 80s – the ubiquitous MP3 player. And certainly from a design perspective it is pretty appealing and for Mac owners it really is the only portable player to make any sense, especially if you use iTunes as your main music file organiser. Although iTunes also works under Windows, if you already have a large library of songs then it is a total pain to import these into iTunes playlists just to be dumped by album on to the iPod. What the iPod has going for it really is ‘street cred’ – and has almost become as much a fashion accessory as anything else. Because of this (and because it is an Apple product) it is overpriced. Add to that problems with the fixed battery and it is really worthwhile looking at some alternatives especially if you are a PC user. One alternative I came across in Japan was the iRiver H120 (www.iriver.com). It is also available in Australia and through mail order. This is very similar to the iPod, about the same size and weight, but black and metallic edged. Unlike the iPod it has a built in FM radio as well as offering recording. It accepts both optical and analogue inputs and has a built in microphone and anything can be recorded for up to an hour per file at any bitrate as an MP3 in stereo or mono. This alone makes it a pretty handy device. Also, it acts just like a normal external hard disk so there is no need to make ‘playlists’ although it accept all the normal playlist formats as well as WMA and Ogg Vobis files. It is priced slightly cheaper than the iPod but although it claims to work on a Mac it is really only recommended for PC users. A slightly more clunky but flexible and low cost solution comes from a small company called Vosonic. The Vosonic XS Drive Pro (www.xs-drive.com) is really an external hard drive enclosure that has an audio output, volume control, and flash memory card reader all in one. You buy the casing and then put whatever size hard drive you want inside it. It runs off both an internal rechargeable battery as well as accepting normal batteries which is a nifty but weighty feature. Being able to put your own drive inside means that a 20gb unit can be as cheap as $300 (www.eyo.com.au for example) Frigid is rocking on at the @Newtown on Sunday evenings and it’s a nice warm place to be on a cold Sunday night. On the long weekend Sunday we have the entire Symbiotic Sound System crew in town with Pasobionic, Guitarkus, Music vs Physics and more all all playing live sets, then on June 20 our old mate Neural makes the journey down from Coffs Harbour. . . . . oh, its free entry too. Yellow Peril (www.snarl.org)  Goto
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