About a month ago I dropped my portable cd player (that I paid over $200 for about 5 years ago) and broke the CD playing part of it. FM radio still works. I had been thinking about buying an mp3 player for a very long time but could never justify it since I had my cd player and a bunch of cds. Now that it's broken it's time to upgrade.
I decided that I don't want a hard drive player. Sure they can hold way way more music, but over the years I've learned not to trust hard drives to last more than lets say 4-5 years. Also the hard drive players skip if you go jogging and put them in your pocket. (not that I exercise that much anyway but I plan to :) So that narrows things down to a flash player. The largest flash memory player available at this time is 2GB - top of the line. Since I don't have "Jeff ears" (can hear the difference between 128kbit/sec and 192kbit/sec) I can encode all my cds at 128kbit/sec and get 1/3 more music on.
I ended up choosing the Cowon iAudio G3 2GB. It uses 1 AA battery (so if it dies I can replace it instead of having to plug it in and recharge), lasts up to 50 hours, FM tuner, records fm, voice and aux input directly to mp3, and in my opinion is one of the best flash memory mp3 players available at the moment. The new mp3 player should arrive tomorrow. I'll be able to hold about 35-40 CDs on it. (I've encoded 30 already). I hope cars start getting built in mp3 players (flash memory) in the future. Whenever I buy my next car, I'd like to be able to see my car's sterio as a computer on my network that I can drag/drop music onto wirelessly.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
