My $.02 I personally own a Sonic blue Rio Volt and really like it. I've never heard of the iriver, but oh well. Things I really like about the Rio Volt 1. 10 hours of music per CD (with 128bit mp3's). 2. doesn't use some weirdo proprietary storage device that they'll stop manufacturing 6 months from now. 3. Can play regular CD's. This weighed heavily into getting a CD based device. I'm not going to carry an mp3 player and a CD player. Invariably, I go some where and someone's got a CD they want to listen to... 4. supports different bit depths on mp3's. My advisor got a cheaper CD based mp3 player and it just assumes that everything's 128bit. His 96bit hotel California mp3 sounds like "Alvin and the chipmunks do the eagles greatest hits" 5. has a recessed switch to disable the controls on the unit. You don't know how many sets of batteries I killed in my Sony Discman because I'd put it in my backpack and the buttons would get pressed and it would play Ride the lightning over and over. 6. The controls are good but a bit esoteric. I've got a CD with the complete works of Pink Floyd on it, organized as "albums as subdirectories" so its got ~156 songs. Until you understand the controls (or read the instructions) finding a single song is a bit mind bending. 7. It has a 40 second cache so the battery life is pretty long. Things I don't like about the Rio Volt: 1. The volume sucks on it. The ear bud headphones are just a complete waste, unless your dumbo. You'll want a pair of headphones with their own gain volume. 2. The battery cover opens easily, not really a big deal, but annoying. 3. Can't recharge batteries in the device. My old discman does this, why couldn't these guys? 4. Those stupid dancing people and that spinning CD icon (which looks a lot like the fan icon on the front of a Sun E1000 fibre array). I would have ditched the people and made the text display larger so you could put more info on it. (in the same vein I would have dumped the stupid fan icon and put "FAN BROKE" but that's just me...:) I'll bring my mp3 player with me to the next wlug meeting so anybody who wants to check it out are welcome. Tim. -----Original Message----- From: Sands Fish [mailto:fishsands@yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 7:46 AM To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Subject: Re: [Wlug] MP3 Player recommendations A little more depth on the Sonicblue Rio Volt SP250: This is the model I was going to (and still might) purchase, kuz you can't be a cool dork w/out a portable mp3 player. ;) When I dug a little deeper into this model, I came across it's European counter-part, the iRiver. It is, of course, a little more expensive. Essentially, it's from the same company who OEM's the RioVolt line, but the trick is, they water down their products for the American market. There are a few things that the iRiver has that the RioVolt doesn't. 1.) LCD on the remote control. I don't know how much this interests people, but it's a nice little feature. Also, I believe those stupid dancing people that everyone so widely hated do not appear on the iRiver. 2.) I've been told by people experienced in both players that there are much more frequent firmware revisions for the iRiver. Oh, and this is a good place to mention that this is the feature that made me wanna buy it. As patches/fixes/upgrades are made for the player, you can d/l firmware upgrades, burn them to a cd, and run them in the player. One thing that really interested me is that, on the iRiver site http://www.iriver.com/english/imp250.htm they mention the potential implementation of the OGG Vorbis format, which I'm a big fan of, (no royalties threatened like MP3.) This is something I haven't seen mentioned for the American version, but who knows. One other thing I should mention. You'll need a power converter for this model. :) If anyone does end up with this player, please post your impressions on the list. I haven't completely made up my mind yet whether I want to pay more. Sincerely, Cheapskate Sands Fish <x>< --- "Charles R . Anderson" <cra@WPI.EDU> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 03:00:26PM -0500, Andy Stewart wrote: andystewart> Christmas is coming, and I'm thinking about asking Santa for a portable andystewart> MP3 player. Of course, it needs to work with Linux.

You to, eh?

andystewart> Judging from the looks of the CDs which I've ripped into MP3 files, 32 MB andystewart> of memory looks like it might be a tad small for a single CD, while 64 MB andystewart> looks like it might do the trick for loading up around 2 CDs worth of andystewart> music. Is this a fair assessment? Since I use compact flash for my andystewart> digital camera, any MP3 player that uses this medium should probably get andystewart> extra consideration, I would think.

Personally, I think the memory-based MP3 players are way too expensive for how many songs they can hold. I'd rather have a CD-ROM-based player, since a CD can hold about 10 hours of music. Also, you don't have to worry about Linux compatibility, since it will take any standard ISO9660 CD-ROM which you can burn from Linux just fine. The other type of players, based on hard drives, are also too expensive for my taste, and who needs to store 100's of hours of music on a portable device? The CD-MP3 players are the "just right" price/performance right now.

The latest CD-MP3 players have come a long way since the Genica 1st generation units. By far the best ones I have found are these two, since they have excellent navigation capabilities, which you'll need to navigate the hundreds of songs on a CD:

Sonicblue Rio Volt SP250 TDK Mojo

Check out their reviews on http://music.cnet.com/ . They both got Editor's Choice.

-- Charles R. Anderson <cra@wpi.edu> / http://angus.ind.wpi.edu/~cra/ PGP Key ID: 49BB5886 Fingerprint: EBA3 A106 7C93 FA07 8E15 3AC2 C367 A0F9 49BB 5886 _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

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