Recommended "MP3" player for prog use?

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Well be sure to check that the Cell phone can tackle "regular" headphones...most these days use special ones...

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Actually, my phones have adapters for both small sizes of plugs (standard, mini, and cell phone tiny ones).

Last month I bought a 256mb mpio (korean) mp3 player and I'm very happy with it. ONe of the really nice things about prog is that you can listen to the same stuff much longer so I find 256 k takes me about a month to get sick of the music on it...easy to change too. I put the phone cable through the lanyard ring on the player and looped it around my neck and attached it to itself again with some shrink wrap and the wires are the right length and I don't need a lanyard--makes it a bit lighter too. (sounds like self-strangulation)

Just my two cents worth on the quality of sound debate: I might have not too developed ears hi-fi wise but it seems that some people are more into equipment than music. If you locked me in a room for a year with nothing but a 20-year old cheapo mono cassette player and a few prog cassettes, I sure wouldn't leave it alone saying it didn't sound good enough.

It's great to push the envelope but for me (just for me) the point of diminishing returns--or indeed even noticing any returns--seems to be at about 192mbps or so. There's nothing like live though. I've never heard any prog live...so deprived.

Thanks for all the advice everyone.

Prog is great.

Jay

Jay Klmnop wrote: Thanks for all the advice. I think I'll wait till we get back to Canada and see what's out there; I might get a cell phone with a player built in. To me, records and digital are the best ways to go--a turntable at home and a music file (MP3) player for on the road. For me, a removeable battery, some kind of card memory system, power to run ear-covering full-size headphones and at least 512meg memory are my main criteria. I think a cell-phone might have all these.

Well be sure to check that the Cell phone can tackle "regular" headphones...most these days use special ones...

One of the best Cell phones with mp3 function i would have to say is Sony Ericsson W800i or the cheaper model W550i

Lindsay Lohan wrote: Ah i have never heard the AWE32 hu humm but i got one pc with a SB16 and that is what MIDI should sound like! Todays soundcards sound awfull when they playback MIDI sequences

The AWE uses the same Roland MPU401 MIDI processor as the SB16 does, but it was the first soundcard to incorporate the newly acquired EMU 8000 hardware for sound synthesis. The 32, confusingly, referred to the number of simultaneous voices that it could process in hardware. The AWE64 added 32 more, but in software.

MIDI playback with an AWE32 is in a new dimension, compared with the SB16, as you can map Soundfonts to the MIDI tables, thus replacing the dodgy MIDI piano sounds with, e.g. a high resolution Steinway.

...but if you're looking for a cheap mp3 player, then the CnMemory A-MP3 MusicBox looks a good option, as you can carry a supply of SD cards around, so that you don't run out of music.

It's really cheap, so it probably sounds horrible - but it looks like a good portable solution.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID= 159413

^ doesn't matter anyway, because the topic is "what's the best mp3 player for prog".

I was more impressed with the AWE 32, which had Wavetable synthesis and the ability to process the innovative idea of Soundfonts, stored in memory on the card itself - a fully-fledged sampler on a soundcard!

This was brilliant, because it meant I didn't have to splash out £1,000 on a sampler, but I could use Vienna soundfont studio to create my own samples of sounds and incorporate them in mixes, so my budget PC could do most of the things a professional studio could do.

Using MIDI, you could sync the sampled waveforms easily and get such a degree of accurracy in the notes that you could write "impossible" music that sounded like it was half being played by humans and half as processed digital music - very fashionable in the early 1990s.

I've got recordings somewhere...

In just about every hardware test I've read (and I read loads of hardware tests because I'm a sad techno-nerd), Creative products have the best sound quality - and small wonder, since they've been creating digital music technology since the early 1990s.

I still remember buying my first "Sound Blaster" PC card in 1991, when almost no PCs had sound, and being bowled over backwards at having not only real sound, but the ability to record myself playing and manipulate the sound with no quality loss!

But I digress...

I much prefer the sound of my Discman to any other portable music solution, but Creative mp3 players sound the best of all the solid state ones, IMO.