MP3 Recommendation

Hi,

Im thinking about buying an MP3 player for use when running. Can anyone recommend a decent player upto £150.

Steve
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Comments

  • I've just bought an mpio dmk128 - I got it from ebay but you can get it for £150 from www.ihavetohave.it. It has 128Mb (2 hours music?) and is about the size of a lipstick holder/cigarette lighter - 30g. Seems v. easy and quick to upload music to it.
    Got it about two days ago and am taking it for its first run today - I'll probably have to use different headphones though since the little earphones provided, although good quality, fall out when I jog with it.
    V. pleased with it so far.

    Trickle
  • Steve,

    I've had a Compaq IPAQ for several months and I love it.

    It cost me £140 (duty free at Gatwick) but I'm sure you can get it even cheaper than that on Internet.

    It works on multimedia cards and is thus very small and light. The belt clip is very secure and will not bounce off if attached to your shorts.

    No problems ripping and downloading (uses Musicmatch -supplied- to connect to your PC).

    Takes 2 X 64 MB cards at a time and has an open slot if you can afford lots of extra memory cards (about £50 each at the moment, so I just have the two). But two cards will give you about 3hours of music. You just have to change playlists now and again for some variety.

    Quality of the sound is great.

    Fantastic feelin to have skip free music at any pace.


    I would highly recomend this one.

    Hope this helps
  • Thanks guys. Certainly some food for thought. I would probably sway towards the mpio purely because of the size of it.

    thanks for the advce!
  • Yes, I considered the mpio and if expandable memory wasn't important to me I may have chosen it. It also got good reviews on the web.

    Enjoy whatever you choose
  • Steve,
    Don't know if you can stretch to 229 quid but if you can, the Apple iPod is a thing of great beauty and the 5Gb model will store an incredible 1000 songs on it. They also do a 10Gb (2,000 songs) and a 20Gb (4,000). I'm thinking of buying one having seen and heard it recently. Seems to get brilliant reviews and is tiny (about the size of a pack of cards. It's expensive but it really is cutting edge technology and design and will make all your friends deeply envious. Sadly I don't think it makes you run better

    PS I haven't got one . . . yet but sant is on his way
  • Steve
    I got an RCA Kazoo i bought it in Florida for about £60. I get about an hour of music on it, you can also buy a smartmedia card to boost up the memory so youll get even longer. I have 64MB of internal memory.

    Hope this helps.
  • Editor,

    Do you need an Apple Mac Computer to download songs onto the iPOD? or can you use any PC?

    What does it weigh with that amount of hard drive memory?

    It does sound the ultimate (if anything ever happened to my Compaq - God forbid because I love the thing) if the above are not problems.

    cheers
  • Ed,

    Sorry forgot to ask if you know what the battery life is like on the iPOD. Does powering a hard drive eat up the juice?

    thanks
  • I bought the MPIO and bought it specifically for running. I have to say it is an excellent product and I wouldn't recommend less than 128mb if you are running 6m+.

    NEGATIVES
    As Trickle says the supplied headphones are totally useless.
    I'm not convinced about it's waterproofness and fear it is a fair-weather tool
    The flap covering the USB connection point is a little delicate.
    I'm not convinced the sound is loud enough - I could be going deaf - or it could be a PC setting but I'd prefer beefing up the volume a little on some tracks

    POSITIVES
    Very light - hardly noticeable when running.
    Supplied belt clip is excellent - clear plastic and very strong - didn't use the arm strap
    Song upload quick and easy
    Battery life good

    Hope this helps.

    David
  • Hi folks... I've recently bought a Nike Rio (Sports Audio) 64mb player. Comes with a waist belt clip and also an arm band, which is great for use whilst running. The headphones are runner friendly too. Stores about 1.5 hours CD quality music or more if you reduce the quality slightly - I can't tell the difference myself! Over five hours of battery use of 1 AA battery too!I bought my player through e-bay for £85.00 although they retail for a lor more in the shops.
  • Sorry for slow response about Apple iPod. They do work best with an Apple computers running the iTunes software (quite brilliant) but they now do a PC version (same prices) which I'm told by a PC savvy friend is excellent.
    It's very light and there is no problem with battery life unless you go out and run 100 miles at a time
  • thanks Ed.
    Will bear this one in mind if I drop and run over my Compaq.

    Seem to be some good mp3 players about.

    cheers
  • I'm looking for a small mp3 player also, I reckon I'm gonna send off for the Kiiro CA128S from Amazon as it's 128 MB and down to under £100... And it's tiny. There is a page of reviews at http://www.reviewcentre.com/items18.php3
  • Frog - be interested to hear what you think of it - I'm on the lookout for an MP3 player too :o)
  • Ordered it earlier - It said 1 to 2 weeks... I hope its closer to 1 :)

    I'll try and post back with my views...

  • OK, so having read all of this, I now have a really dumb question. I'm not an IT person, so please bear with me....

    All these MP3 players, am I right in thinking that you can only "download"(?) music onto them from your PC? ie if the only PC I have access to is my work laptop, which doesn't like MP3s, then an MP3 player is useless to me? You can't, say, hook a CD player up to them to record music onto them???

    Like I say, it's probably a dumb question, but I'm a bit behind the times!
  • I think some mp3 players WILL allow direct recording from CD, but not most, and not the cheaper ones.
    But if you have a laptop, then you *can* download mp3's to any mp3 player, generally provided it runs a version of windows, or the player specifically supports the Apple Mac.
    Is the reason your work PC doesn't like mp3's a restriction laid down by the company, or is it just not configured to play them? If its not to do with company policy, you can download free software that will rip(convert) your cd's and create mp3s. Provided of course you have a usb port, and a cd drive, and are NOT running Windows NT (which doesn't support usb).
    But seriously I wouldn't even think of buying an mp3 player unless I had my own PC, as changing tracks would be too much of a bind. Even if you find one of the ones that WILL allow cd to mp3 recording, that would mean real time transfer speeds whenever you wanted a change...ugh.

  • Unfortunately, it's down to company policy. B*gger.
  • :/

    To be honest looking around I can't actually find one that records from cd directly (I'm sure I saw one in T3 or something), but if you're after something small and reasonably jog-proof, the latest minidisc players are supposed to be pretty good. Mine skips unfortunately, that's why I have just gone the mp3 route...

  • Thanks Frog. Just been looking in the Argos catalogue and also on Amazon, and the latest Sony players seem to have something called G-protection, which supposedly makes the MD player jog-proof and prevents skipping. Maybe I should do like I did when I tested my new running shoes, and put one on in the shop and run up and down with it!

  • Sounds like good a good idea... :) The latest ones all have Long play too, which is essentially the same idea as mp3, using Sony's own compression system instead...Have fun...
  • Oh and when you do try it out, do it for a good couple of minutes, mine has a 20 second memory, so it was fine...for about 20 seconds :)
  • Just bid for a 128Mb player from Ebay.
    I love listening to shows on Radio 4 when I run but I tend to miss all the good ones.
    With the BBC's radio on demand you can download a lot of their shows onto your Hard Drive (you need some Software called Total Recorder though) and then transfer across to the MP3 player. Can't wait !
  • I have an mp3, not that impressed with it. Had it less that six months and its broken, so going to be fun sorting this out.

    I have bought a Sony Minidisc thats got that g'shock thingy, and went out running with it last night and have to say a lot more happy with it than my mp3.

    The good thing about it is that you can download songs off your PC and cram loads onto this thing using long play so I am a happy bunny.
  • For anybody still looking for a good MP3 player, check-out the NEXII from Frontierlabs (www.frontierlabs.com). I've had mine about a year and it is excellent. It takes all the standard compact Flash cards and will even take the IBM microdrive. I use it with a 128Mb card and get about 3hrs out of it. It has a nice feature that allows you to set it to 'shuffle' mode which gives you random songs. It suupports 'folders' which lets you organise your music. Its lightweight and has a neoprene protective cover with a decent clip for sticking on your shorts (or wherever). The downside are the headphones. They are the bog-standard 'over-the-head' jobbies so I use my little 'plug-ins' instead.
    I bought mine for £99 and I have seen them on the web.
  • Hi all,

    I also have a NexII but mine was ordered with a 256MB memory card, just £150ish. As TE says the headphones were poor, and I now have the in ear type which are much better and more comfortable.

    The belt clip gave me some grief as well but I've got round that as well. It's also been through afew rain storms and the neoprene seems to be pretty rain proof.

    Check www.advancedmp3players.com for the latest prices
  • I have a Kiiro 64 MB player that I am very happy with. It's very small, only about £80 from Amazon, and takes about 20 songs. Ideal for my running.
  • Try the Archos Jukebox Studio 20 - slightly more than the £150 (£240 ish incl VAT from www.insight.com/uk), but a great, great machine.

    With 20Gb you've got the space for litteraly hundreds of CD's, its got great sound quality, 10 hour re-charagble batteries and is pretty small. Great for those dull, dull moments at work as well.
  • have a Kiiro 64 as well and it is excellent. My only crticism is that the battery compartment cover is a bit flimsy.
    I can get about 1hr 15 mins worth of CD quality music on it or double that amount at radio quality. It did not come with any software to record CDs so I downloaded MusicMatch for free.
    It fits (just) in the key pocket of my tracksters when it rains.
    Overall, very impressed!
  • Just seen that you can get a 128MB version of the Kiiro for £99 now... Tempted even though I've got the 64. Fits perfectly in a key pocket, I find.
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