What will really kill .mp3 players are better cellphone batteries and DACs.
50$: SanDisk Clip Sport 8GB or 16GB
This is the type I’ve been using for years. Compact, light, fairly robust, strong clip for vigorous dancing, FM tuner, MicroSDHC card slot, 30+ hour charge, everything you need and little you don’t. Cheap eBay screen protectors, silicone case, and slightly better earbuds if you want to splurge, but you’re already getting your money’s worth many times over. Anything cheaper is junk and you’re looking at 3X more before anything else can be recommended.
$150 or more:
You’ll need to do a bit more homework and read a lot of annoying audiophile opinion if you’re looking at anything fancier, but once all the research is done I can almost guarantee it’ll be made by Fiio.
There’s quite a few good reasons to want an MP3 player over a phone. For one thing, my phone is very expensive and fragile. I don’t want to use it while working out because the possibility of me dropping it and breaking it is much higher than everyday use. Would I rather lose a $40 mp3 player or a $600 phone to my sweaty hands or my headphone cord getting caught on something?
My other main use for listening to music is in my car. There’s no dedicated spot to put the phone next to me so it would get thrown on a seat or in a cup holder and slide/rattle around, which can’t be good for it either and makes me accessing it to change music selection a chore. Then of course is the issue that I use my phone for GPS when necessary, so changing my music selection would also be difficult in that use case scenario, at least a slide and a tap on a touch screen that I have to look at while I’m driving. An mp3 player has physical buttons and is a separate device so I don’t even have to take my eyes off the road or interrupt my map to press the next button. And finally, my phone doesn’t have expandable data space, and I’m already running pretty full thanks to the apps I have installed. I can play music on an mp3 player or my phone, but I can only play games on my phone. You can see what takes priority here.
A burner phone sounds like an option but still runs into the problem of a touchscreen robbing my eyes off the road. It’s too bad my Clip+ went batty, but it looks like the newer Sansa models have sorted out some problems so maybe I can stop burning CDs for my car and get back to the mp3 player via one of the ones linked in this thread.
If you’re starting with CDs, there are two steps: (1) ripping* the tracks from CDs onto your computer, and (2) transferring the resulting MP3 files to the MP3 player. If you’re starting with MP3 files that you downloaded from someplace, you only need to worry about the second step.
For (1), you need some sort of software that will rip CDs (like iTunes does). I’ve always used Windows Media Player that comes with Windows, but there are other options out there. Windows Media Player can also handle (2). Or, you can drag-and-drop the files/folders onto the MP3 player the same way you’d copy files to something like a USB drive.
*I suspect you meant “ripping,” not “burning.” Burning involves writing data to a CD; ripping involves reading data from a CD.
Sansa has three models from $30-$60. The most expensive one (on the left) does have bluetooth. I bought another one earlier this year when the volume went on my old one. “Splurged” on the bluetooth model because I found a set of Bone phones cheap. They are significantly smaller & lighter than a phone, which is why I prefer them; I don’t run w/ a phone as I’ve never found a place to put a phone that I like & where it doesn’t bounce.
As Thudlow Boink kind of stated, it plugs in to the computer via a USB port & is like a drive, can just copy files over.
Nthing the Sansa clips- I have one older model (can’t remember which offhand, it was a gift) which took everything I could throw at it backpacking for over a year, worked fine for the next 8 or so years, then suddenly died. The battery life was great, so I bought a more recent model with a larger memory plus memory card slot, at which point, the old one sprang back to life.
The newer ones do feel less solid, and I’m not sure I’ll get over a decade’s use out of them, but I’ve used mine regularly for a few years now and don’t have any complaints.
Ahh, the Bone Phone. Back in 1980 or so I was a copywriter for a department store and got to write the announcement that we now had the Bone Phone available. It was the first ad I ever wrote where the product sold out.
I just remembered the worst/most annoying downgrade going from the Clip+ to the Clip Jam: Scanning through audiobooks and podcasts using Fast Forward and Rewind was a million times better on the Clip+. When holding down the button, the scanning speed increased every few seconds:
~20 seconds per second
~1 minute per second
~2 minutes per second
~5 minutes per second
~10 minutes per second
The Clip Jam hangs at speed 2 for like a full minute, then grudgingly kicks up to speed 3 for pretty much forever.
Let’s say I accidentally lose my place 3 hours into a 4 hour file, which does happen to me. (I almost exclusively use my mp3 player to listen to 4+ hour files.)
With the Clip+, I could scan from the start to 3 hours in like 15 seconds, and then spend another 15 seconds overshooting in either direction by smaller and smaller increments until close enough.
With the Clip Jam, scanning from the start to 3 hours in literally takes several minutes. That may not sound like much, but imagine standing there holding a FFWD button for literally 300 seconds. 1, 2, 3, 4, … It’s a friggin’ eternity. So now I am much, much more careful about not accidentally losing my place than I had to be with the Clip+.
My MP3 player, a Sony, is 2" x 3" x.25" and weighs almost nothing. My smart phone is a lot bigger and heavier and as mentioned earlier, it is fragile. No contest and I am glad to know I can replace the one I have been using for 11 years when it finally dies.
Another thing is the earbuds. I have no experience with bluetooth, but if you’re going with wired earbuds, I find the ones that come with sandisk clips to be less than ideal. Bulky with foam padding so they’re less comfortable in my ears, and they sound thin and tinny.
Not that $5 earbuds are ever going to impress an audiophile, but I much prefer the comfort and sound quality of these:
The .m3u file format for playlists is commonly supported by “real” mp3 players. You can create them using a lot of tools. I use good old Winamp. But note that just plain copying them to the player may not work. The entries might point to “C:\dirname\songname.mp3”, for example, which won’t exist on the player.
Copying a playlist to a device with Winamp works, but it munges the playlist name on the device so I have to rename it back. (Hmm, that might be an iPod only issue. No, I don’t use iTunes or any Apple bloatware to maintain my iPods.)
You can just create folders, dump songs into a folder and play them that way. But remember the songs are usually played in the order they appear in a directory. There are directory reorder tools to put them in the right order if there’s a problem. I use an old tool called “Reorganize!” and other tricks. (E.g., if the songs are numbered 01, 02, etc. Then a standard MS-Windows copy will preserve the order.)
I just want to add that I’m another MP3-player-o-phile.
I’m most often listening to music when running or working out, so the additional portability is noticeable to me, plus it doesn’t matter if I drop it or even lose it.
As a side bonus, running without my phone means I’m off the grid for a while
I retired my old Sandisk and use what was my old Samsung cell phone. Put my 3300 song library on one 32 gig mini card and it works great. The battery lasts a lot longer too. Simple copy and paste instead of the Sandisk software that could be a bit wonky.
True, but you don’t have to use that software with a Sandisk. You can copy and paste exactly like a cellphone.
For this particular function, they’re all really the same thing: a memory card reader and a application to play the files. They rest is just one’s preferences for how it all gets housed.
Really? I can’t find any indication in the Clip Jam user manual that it can record voice or record FM radio. Those were key functions of the Clip+
I’m following up because I lost my Clip+, and looked for a replacement with the same functions. Because it’s discontinued, it’s going for around $150 new on Ebay. However, I found something called Klangtop K-183 (for about $30 new) that has all those functions–including voice and FM radio recording. So far–upon initial use–it seems just as good as the Clip+, plus, it also has Bluetooth connectivity, though I haven’t tested it to see how that works. The interface is better, but the case does seem a little less sturdy. Also, the USB cable is the common Micro-USB, (not the mini-b 5-pin of the Clip+, which is less used now).
