Bonneville America Forums Forums Technical Forums Accessories MP3 Players

I am thinking about getting a MP3 player to listen to music while I ride. The problem is, I really dont have a clue what to look for in a decent, but not overly expensive MP3 player. I would like to get something that I can store 3 or 4 hours of music on. Their are tons of players on eBay, and that makes it even more confusing. I am finding a ton of them that are also thumb drives, voice recorders, digital cameras, FM tuners and more. Its nuts.

Soren

This might not be what you are looking for... but I got a discman that will play MP3 CD's. It's also got a little remote that I clip on the outside of my pocket. It's real low profile so it slips into my pocket with little persuading. Not as small as an MP3 player by any stretch, but it does the trick, and I can play any CD I have too.

got the ipod shuffle for b-day and it holds 240 song for $149. from target.It's great the size of a pack of gum.Down load all your music form cds on the shuffle.Runs 8-10 hours and it fits andwhere you want it to.Go to the apple stores and try one out.Someone on this site to but the koss stero ear plugs they have to be better than the ipod ones for motorcycling riding.Good luck if i can help let me know.Stan

Just get the IPod, it is it ...

Quote:

---

I am thinking about getting a MP3 player to listen to music while I ride. The problem is, I really dont have a clue what to look for in a decent, but not overly expensive MP3 player. I would like to get something that I can store 3 or 4 hours of music on. Their are tons of players on eBay, and that makes it even more confusing. I am finding a ton of them that are also thumb drives, voice recorders, digital cameras, FM tuners and more. Its nuts.

Soren

---

I use a Rio Chiba 256(mb). I added another 256mb SD card to it. I think I can get about 100 songs on it. It will run about 17 hours on a single AAA battery. Very small. Fits great in my jacket pocket. I bought it last year for about $140, but it's down to about $108 on Amazon.com now. I also bought Sony earbud headphones which sound great and seal out a lot of noise.

Rio Chiba 256
Sony Earbuds

I'll throw in my pitch for minidisc players -- they're cheaper and more versitle than MP3 players by a longshot... the best parts of MP3 players and CD players all rolled into one. Check out www.minidisco.com.

I've used one while riding for years and they work really well.

--Jaeger

Jaeger,

Can I assume it handles vibration and bumps okay? That's one of the reasons I stayed away from the CD player types (also the size of those are a consideration). I've been looking to upgrade to another player with a little more file capacity but the harddrive-based MP3 players are a bit pricey. I was looking at the Rio Karma which holds 5GB for about $200.

So.. how much music can you put on a 256mb mp3 player?

Soren

This is quite the can of worms you've opened here.

The usual bit rate of MP3's is 128 kb/sec. This is comparable to listening to AM radio. They can be recorded at lower rates or at higher rates, lower=less quality/more songs per mb, higher bit rate=better quality/less songs per mb.
I personally have no idea what the little MP3 players will play as far as bitrate goes, but a good rule of thumb is that a minute of music on a cd takes about 10mb of storage on a hard drive. That roughly equals 1mb when encoded at 128kb/sec..... So a 256mb player should hold about 240 minutes of music... at a generic guess of 4 minutes per song you are looking at 60 AM radio sounding songs.
This information may be a moot point, as I have no experience whatsoever with little MP3 players... but I have over 52gb of music stored as 160kbs MP3's on an external hard drive..... that is slightly above FM radio quality, a compromise between storage space and old ears....

Hey Flesz, I have the Koss, the foam works good, but the foam pops off the phone itself every time I remove my helmet. Might check out those Sony ones FJ has...

OK, You've basically got 3 sorts of players, all revolving around the storage method.

1 Hard drive based players hold the most tracks, but chew up battery power fastest and are the most fragile. These things can hold up to 20GB of files.

2 Next up is disk based ones (CD or MiniDisk). One CD will hold a fair bit of music, but again they don't take well to knocks. Each CD can only take 700MB or so of files, but it's fairly easy to carry a few disks with you and change them on gas stops.

3 Finally there's memory based ones. These just use memory chips to store the files so they're very robust and good on batterys, but limited in space. Some of these players seperate memory cartridges (like the ones you see in digital cameras) so you can carry more music and change it round as you go, but memory's expensive.

The storage space is not the only thing that affects the play-time - the quality the MP3's are encoded at does too. As has already been mentioned, the better the quality, the bigger the file. MP3 quality is measured in kbps (KiloBits per Second). 196kbps is generally considered to be CD quality, 128kbps is roughly radio quality, and 96kbps is pretty poor indeed - however at 55mph you're probably not going to notice if the high notes are a little scratchy. Either way it pays to find out what sort of bitrate the player supports. Some also support VBR (Variable BitRate) which increases the bitrate in complex parts of the music, and decrease it in simpler parts... best of both worlds.

There's lots of other features/gimmicks that they throw in, like external speakers, FM radios & voice recorders, rechargable batterys etc - it's up to you to decide which of them you want.

My personal choice to was buy a cellphone that has a replaceable memory chips and can play MP3's and FM radio through the same headset as the phone itself uses. When the fone rings the music mutes and the fone auto-answers. When the caller hangs up the music starts again. Having said that I've found it's usually more bother than it's worth so it's rare that I actually use it anymore.

Hope that lot helps...

Matt

Grump, at 60mph with wind and exhaust noise, can you really tell the difference between "AM sound" and "slightly better than FM sound"? Even with not so old ears, I think that won't be an issue. Heck, I tried my CD player and earbuds, and couldn't get the thing loud enough to make it worth listening too, without it sounding so loud that it was probably damaging my ears.

Greg,
Probably not. But once you buy an MP3 player, you may find you want to use it off the bike as well. Some people connect them to their sound systems or their computers to use as a music source. I was just pointing out that the bitrate determines the size of each file and also the quality of the recording. You can record them in mono at a tiny bitrate and get oodles of songs but they'll sound like crap.......

And there is another feature to look for when buying portable cd players - it is a buffer memory. This is a feature that actually reads ahead on the cd, so if the player gets bumped or jarred the player reads from memory so the music isn't interupted...

Greg, earbids with foam or rubber inserts block WAY better than normal ones. I used to have normal ones, cranked it all the way, hurt my ears, still barely heard it. Got those foam ones, and now I'm at less than half volume and can hear enough music to keep me happy.

Grump, oh, I know about MP3 players. I don't have one personally, but do have quite a MP3 songs I've downloaded at home, and just use a memory stick to bring to work with me, then I just use RealPlayer here at work to listen to them... I may try one if I can find earplugs like Benny mentions that block out the noise so I can listen to the songs without feeling like I'm at a Ted Nugent concert and plopped down right in front of the speakers...

Benny, can you recommend a specific brand/part number, to speed up finding some?

I bought an Archos Jukebox Multimedia player about 18 month ago. It was reviewed somewhere as one of the best techno 'gadgets' to have of the year, can't remember what magazine unfortunately. Basically a 20 gig hard drive that you can store - play/ view mp3, mpeg, jpeg files on. I was only bothered about the mp3 side of things, which it does really well. There wasn't many dedicated mp3 players available at the time so I went for that one and paid quite a lot (about £340) They've come down a lot since then, I would have thought you could pick up a decent dedicated mp3 player for around £200, it'll be considerably cheaper in the States or anywhere else come to think of it...
It'll play mp3s for about 4 hours on a full charge. I've recorded my whole CD collection on 196 kbs (haven't counted but estimate around 350 albums) and a lot of my friends' CDs also. You'll get a lot more albums recording at 128 kbs. It's very stable on the whole, occasionally crashes if it's running low on power. Doesn't jump or crash with knocks, as CD players do, minidisc players can still jump if jarred enough. Can play albums normally or random 'shuffle' songs/ repeat etc. Does quite good recordings if you want to record anything live or 'bootleg' a performance etc. Its about 4"x3"x1.5", quite compact and very sturdy. Good for fitting into a jacket pocket for when you're riding.
There's a lot more mp3 players around now though, think there's some 40 gig drives available. I'd do a search or check some mags out to see what reviews are available.

Greg, Friar John gave a link to some Sony ear plugs earlier, you can probably get them at Best Buy or for sure online. I have Koss ones. They come with 3 or 4 different shaped foam inserts. I got them at best buy. I'm thinking of getting the sony ones tho, they appear to be one piece, which is nice cause the foam things fall off mine a lot which means they call out of my ear when I take off my lid.

Brother John --

Yes, absolutely. Minidiscs are pretty much skip-proof -- the gods know I've tried. A single minidisc can hold more than 5 CDs worth of music, roughly (depends on the compression you use). The advantage of minidiscs is that you can change the playlist without going to a computer -- just put in another minidisc. I've used 'em very successfully on the bike for years -- they fit nicely in a front jacket pocket. The players are roughly the size of a pack of ciagarettes.

--Jaeger

Here's FJ's Sony earbud link

and these are the Koss ones I have.

Heja all


Get back ,listen to your engine ,
enjoy the Sound ,hear the spezial feeling and you never
want a mp3 ......

Ride on safety

(without mp3)

Peter

As much as I love the sound of my engine, it gets old on long trips. And when I wear just plain ol' earplugs, the chatter inside my head is worse.

I find myself singing sometimes... another way to scare the wildlife off the road....
Especially my repertoire of Slim Whitman songs...

I can vouch for the Sony MDR-EX51LP ear buds. I've been using them for a couple years now and have even washed them (what is that in the dryer!?) withour hurting them. They operate more like a ear plug so noise is drasticaly reduced. I have the KOSS ones as well and still think they are better sounding and better at noise reduction, but the foam issue (comes off sometimes when removing) is a hassle.

Soren,
I use my old RIO 500 when riding short distances, but for long trips (like to Idaho) I would get at least a 1 gig player. The IPOD shuffle looks good as it dosen't have a hard drive. For $129 bucks it can't be bet. I'm leary about taking my $400 40 gig Ipod on the road!

...my 2 cents

I like listening to my iPod with my noise cancelling ear buds, but I hate the wires. Always seem to be getting in the way.

Now if they made a bluetooth iPod with bluetooth noise cancelling ear buds.....

I just bought a Rio Carbon.
5gb of storage. 20 hr battery life.
It also doubles as a portable hard drive which is really handy at times.
It's easy to use and has quite a few handy features, but its not bogged down with gizmos.
It was $200 canadian at costco. About $150 usd.
If you're looking for earbuds that block outside noise, check out the sure E2C "canal phones".
They are said to have great sound and block out even more outside noise than the sonys. I think they're about 100 bucks.
I've got the sonys now but will be buying the sures soon.

That's a great deal. I picked up an iRiver iFP-899 at Best Buy and was $179. It has about a 20 hr battery life and only holds 1GB of storage. Even with only 1GB, I still have 263 songs on it (wma format at 128 bps).

Soren

I just found out that there is a $20 rebate on the rio carbons. You can get the information on the website.

at the risk of sounding stupid, how does an mp3 work and how do mini disks work?

do you record from cds or computer or...???

thanks,
cat

I have a DELL DJ. 5 Gigs worth of storage. Its about the size of an IPOD. Holds about 2500 songs and is on sale right now for 150 bucks.