I know almost nothing about the various MP3 players. I have an iPod Shuffle and iTunes. The only thing I put on there is podcasts - no music. I know how to do that, but I haven’t ever had the desire to venture beyond that.
I want to get my kids a couple cheap MP3 players for Christmas. They’re little - 6 & 3 - so cheap is very key. As they get older, gentler, and pickier about sound quality, etc., I’ll get them something nicer, but for now, cheap is where it’s at.
What I want to be able to do is load CDs we already own and buy music off the internet to load onto their MP3 players.
Now, I’m pretty sure that a non-Apple MP3 player is not compatible with iTunes. That’s right, right? What are the music-selling websites that are compatible with MP3 players? Any recommendations?
Do any of you have any suggestions for a basic, CHEAP MP3 player that a little kid would be able to operate? It really doesn’t need any function other than to play music I put on it and to have fairly simple buttons that a little kid could operate.
Amazon sells a wide variety of downloadable MP3s—including a number of free tracks and samplers, so you can make sure you know what you’re doing before spending any money. The MP3s they sell are at a fairly high bit rate, which means they sound good but take up a relatively large amount of space. You may want to look into converting them somehow to a lower bitrate before loading them onto your kids’ MP3 players if you want them to have room for lots of music.
Windows Media Player, and/or similar programs, will let you rip CDs to your computer and will let you Sync (i.e. transfer) music from your computer to a connected MP3 player. Many MP3 players, including all the Sansas I’ve used, neither come with nor require any special software.
I don’t know much about iTunes, but if I understand correctly, it doesn’t work with non-Apple MP3 players; you’d have to burn songs onto a CD and re-rip them in MP3 format to get them from iTunes to an MP3 player.
Music purchased from the online iTunes store can’t be played on a non-ipod. HOWEVER, the itunes music manager software program can rip music from CDs into MP3 format which is universally playable. The software defaults to Apple’s AAC format, but that can be changed in the software options. Unfortunately, I can’t give you details on how to do this since I don’t use iTunes.
iTunes can also change AAC files you have downloaded to your computer into MP3, and vice-versa. I use iTunes to make free ringtones by converting an MP3 sample into AAC.
So, with the little shaker MP3 player linked to above, I could buy music at Amazon, save it in Windows Media Player, and load it onto the player. I could also put my CDs into WMP and load them onto the player. Is that all correct? The shaker player has a memory card slot, also, and it comes with a 1GB SD memory card. I could basically increase that MP3 players capacity by using a larger memory card? And is Amazon a decent place to buy music or are there other recommendations?
(thanks for your patience with me - I know these are very basic questions, but I just want to make sure I understand how it all works)
Yes, I think this is all correct. The manual (see below) describes a different way of dragging-and-dropping music to the player, rather than going through WMP, but from looking around on the Internet, I get the impression that using WMP to load music onto the player will also work just fine.
When you put your CDs into WMP, be sure to do so in MP3 format; unlike some other MP3 players, that shaker one apparently doesn’t recognize other audio formats, like WMA.
I found the user manual online here (PDF). According to it, “The SD slot is capable of reading and writing data to the SD cards up to 2 Gbytes in capacity.” So I think you can have up to 2GB in the machine at a time, but you could also swap cards.
My Son adored his Sansa Shake for a couple years (another plus: it runs on batteries so you can keep a spare in your glove box or whatever rather than relying on plugging it into a charger) but, at 10, he “upgraded” to a cheap POS player I bought off Woot.com for fifteen bucks. But this one has an LCD screen and lets you directly pick your songs so he still thinks it’s awesome.
I think the Sansa Shake would be great for your kids.
Oh, in my son’s case, I loaded his music just by plugging the USB into my computer, opening the Shake like any other disc drive and drag-n-dropping the music onto it. No special programs or anything else.
Of course, you need to actually buy some MP3 downloads or rip some tracks off CDs first.
As a final post (sorry about that… just thought of this), may I recommend buying a couple pairs of cheap Walkman style headphones at the local dollar store? Something about young children and earbuds just strikes me as asking for trouble.
Foobar is a great, probably the best free program that will convert any of your music formats, from Wavpack, FLAC, mp3, m4a all kinds.
You can just click and convert. Dbpoweramp is better but it’s not free and it’s while it’s better than Foobar, it’s not that much better especially when you’re dealing with kids
For kids that little go to your computer store or Best Buy and pick up an mp3 player. You can get them for $10.00 bucks. That’s all they as they are likely to “mismanage” it anyway
If junior can prove he can take care of it, then slowly upgrade him to better players.
Word. My daughter (not that young - she’s 12 and was 11 when she got her iPod) has gone through at least 4 sets of headphones. Apparently they don’t respond well to being used as a string for spinning the iPod around in the air. Currently she is headphone-less as a result.
However, I don’t know if that trashes your original version, and I gather MP3 is likely a slightly lower quality version so you want to avoid losing the original, right?
