The big problem with the first crop of stand alone MP3 players is the amount of music you can store. The devices keep MP3 files in non-moving smart cards like those found in digital cameras. Since MP3 files are only one tenth the size of traditional CD sound files, with no loss in quality, vendors are hoping that the 64 meg or so most of them have, will be enough.
I don't think so.
I wanted to store a full recordable CD filled with MP3 music - ten times that which fits on a traditional music CD - then listen to it in the car. Impossible? Read on. Here's how I did it.
1. I used a shareware "ripper" to pull songs off music CDs that I already own, and store them as hard disk files on my Macintosh. 2. Next, I used an shareware "encoder" to convert the files into MP3 format. 3. Then I wrote them to a blank recordable CD using "Toast," software that came free with my CD writer hardware. One CD holds over twelve hours of MP3 music! 4. I installed a shareware MP3 player on my PowerBook laptop computer, and put the CD I had just produced into its CD ROM drive. 5. I plugged the stereo output jack of the PowerBook into my car's cassette player using the same pseudo-cassette adapter I had been using with my old style portable CD player. 6. I used my adapter (12 volt DC via car cigarette lighter to 115 volt AC house current) to keep the PowerBook's internal battery from wearing down during my ten hours of uninterrupted digital quality music in the car from one CD. That's it. That's how I did it. |