Tell me what portable mp3/cd playa/recorda to buy

I've just bought exactly what you ask for on eBay, a Sony Digital Relay. It works as a USB CD recorder attached tot a computer, and plays MP3 and normal CD's. Playback battery life (from a massive camcorder battery) is pathetic though.

I have a top of the range Sony R900 MD and the whole thing is now curved so it has horrible problems playing discs. My R91 was ace though.

Perhaps you shouldn't have flamenco-danced on it.

Be forewarned. The first one I got has the display burn out on me the second day of use.. (which I returned and got full money back for), but the second one I got is still fine. It was a life saver on my road trip (it's nice to play 8 hours of music straight while driving without having to do the little hand-changing-CDs-blindly-on- the-portable dance)

WANT WANT WANT.

Someone please stop me from buying a new iBook so I can use an iPod.

Clearly I need to be duplicated and distributed to all, to alleviate this problem.

Anyway, I'm about to take the plunge meself. At the moment, I'm quite keen on the iRiver T30.

I realise that yr larger name-brand flash-based players are pretty poor value-for-money byte-wise (i.e. you can get 50 times as much storage for about four times as much cash with a HDD-based one) but I'm not sure I can make the conceptual leap into having a music library in my pocket rather than a fancy Walkman. I like the idea of dragging/dropping/deleting directories every morning but with enough stuff on there that I won't get bored if I don't change the content in a week of commuting. Also, £100 is my absolute limit (I've seen the 1GB T30 on Tottenham Court Road for under £80).

The iRivers have a pretty good rep for sound quality. The T30 has a line-in too, which is nice. I'm slightly concerned at the fact that it seems to use that new MS Media Transfer Protocol (i.e. it can be synched with Windows Media Player 10) and so doesn't (apparently) simply show up as a USB mass storage device. I'd like to bypass this and just drag/drop (which, confusingly - at least to me - it claims to be able to do too).

(This, about the T20, is alarming: The T20 uses Microsoft's MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) to manage file transfers, so you're pretty much limited to using Windows Media Player 10's sync system to copy songs to the player. You can do drag-and-drop, too, but Windows monitors the process to make sure you're not copying anything you're not supposed to.)

Also, I use iTunes to organise MP3s on the laptop (it was free with QuickTime - whaddya gonna do?); I presume a device like this will happily handle all the directories and subdirectories iTunes likes to create if I drag them over?

Other recommendations please!

Some classic old skool Mooro there, from about 1973 from the looks of it.

I don't know, Michael.

I have come to terms with my Sony thing, despite all the DRM restrictions and whatnot. I think it helps that it's already hopelessly out of date.

the rio carbon pearl that didn't want to play with linux or win98 was fun while it lasted too. 6G, £129

but i went with iaudio in the end (a 20G M5 although they do flash players) because it was just like a big disk with earphones, works with anything, plays pretty much anything (mp3, ogg, flac... no wma drm though - so not an issue for me)

most of them seemed to be dropping ogg and linux support in favour of supporting new wma formats. this makes me sad. and suspicious.

anythingbutipod.com

I'm trying to avoid anything that needs to be "synched", anything which offers "Drag-and-DropTM" and not just drag-and-drop, anything hanging on the wall at Dixons which is suspiciously cheap, anything with lousy battery life (not too bothered about battery type; AAAs are fine and can always be replaced by their rechargable equivalents) and anything which sounds like balls.

Samsung YP-U1Q 2GB MP3 Player = £80
SanDisk Sansa m250 2Gb MP3 Player = £85
Philips PSA610 3GB Portable Sports Audio Hard Disc MP3 Player = £90
(with Stopwatch function!)
Archos Gmini XS 100 Mini Music Player 3GB = £106
Rio Carbon 5Gb MP3 HDD Player - Pearl White = £83 / £88 used

(i am bored)

Really fancy a dark blue Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB but it doesn't seem all that next to this Samsung.

Should I go clicky-clicky?

It's pretty much exactly what I want - acts like a mass-storage device, so easy drag-and-drop from me iTunes folders. Sound quality through Sony EX-71s is good (I was getting a bit cheesed off with the fretless bass on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter this morning on this bus but this had nothing to do with the reproduction), navigation is a doddle.

Minus points: no seamless transition from track to track, i.e. there's a little muting glitch as it goes over, which is fine for comps but less good for albums with crossfaded/continuous tracks. The little metal clip through which you're supposed to loop the neck-strap (which I don't use) is too close to the headphone jack; jacks with chunky barrels (my Grados, Pam's AKGs) won't squeeze past it. Solution: take it off with a little Muji screwdriver. USB transfer seems a bit slow - little more than 1MB/s - but that's better than spending an entire evening making MD comps. My USB memory stick is 5-10 times faster. Flash limitations?

Thanks, Koogs!

it might be USB1 - my pooter only does usb1 and gets those kinds of speeds. luckily i don't mind waiting minutes for things to happen - i remember floppy disks.

I didn't realise that Samsung had cornered the market in high-capacity flash chipsets; that's what's inside an iPod Nano, apparently.

I have gone 64 or 68 kbps ATRAC 3 (sounds like 128 kbps mp3 apparently) and now I can get literally zillions of choons on my device, and not worry about the crap ones taking up space.

I've got 318 songs on the Samsung and it's about 92% full. I think it does WMA and OGG too. Possibly WAV.

(* - if I really cared I'd have set up the stereo by now instead of waiting for piffling little things like the installation of central heating and flooring - or perhaps it is the audiophilic response to wait for things to be perfect before listening to a single bar).

Don't all players do this? Someone was explaining that it's an intrinic flaw of the MP3 format, though I don't see why players can't compensate for it.

Transfer rate to my 512MB memory stick: 26-30Mbps; transfer rate to my Samsung player through the same USB port: 8Mbps. Hmmm.

Alba: I thought this might be the case; shame on me for living in the 20th century and expecting to listen to LPs in unbroken sequence.

:-)

You want one of these, mate