I am looking at a few mp3 players on eBay. Thought I would ask some advice here in these hallowed halls…
How much music can fit in 32 MB of memory? I would assume that you can get twice as much music with 64 MB…is this correct?
I assume you mean storage capacity - in which case for 32 meg you’d be looking at around 30 mins of music being stored.
If you’re talking RAM then I’m lost…
I’m not sure what that last comment meant because 32 - 64 mb does mean the amount of RAM the player has. I just bought a 64 Mb Nomad IIc player for about $65. It can hold about an hour of music. It is easily and cheaply upgradable using standard Smart Media cards and I plan to upgrade to 128 Mb within the next week or so. Increasing the storage capacity means a linear increase in playing time so you can do the math.
Hard drive based players like the iPod offer storage in the Gb’s and can hold thousands of songs however they are much more expensive, use more power, and have moving parts whereas the RAM based ones don’t.
You are happy with your Nomad II? Or would you suggest looking harder?
32MB will store approx. 8 mp3 songs of standard length at the standard bitrate. Reducing bitrate will reduce quality, but allow more songs to be stored.
64MB will be double of 32MB, therefore 16 mp3 songs at the standard bitrate.
Each mp3 song takes at an average 4-5MB.
If you encode songs at 128kilobit rate, you can generally fit 1 minute of music into 1 Megabyte of storage. Above 128 kilobits, you get better sound quality (but you probably won’t be able to tell with normal headphones) but it takes up more space. Below 128 kilobits, sound quality really starts to suffer, and I reccomend not encodeing at those levels.
To calculate the memory requirement for a given mp3.
MB required = ((bitrate / 8) * duration in seconds) / 1024
milo
So if I understnad this correctly, if I get an mp3 player with 64 MB then I could only save 16 songs on it?
I had higher expectations. I think I will save for an iPod.
I would say get at least 64 megs (and upgradable if needed).
I got one from tigerdirect about 2 months ago, 64 m upgradable to 128 with a smartmedia card for $20 after rebate.
I would suggest about 64-128 MB for every hour of music you want.
Of course that depends on what kind of quality you expect and what format you encode in, but that’s a rough estimate.
newcrasher: DreadCthulhu has it right. Expect 1 minute of acceptable-quality audio per 1MB of storage space. You MIGHT be able to push this a little if you encode at 112kbps or 96kbps instead of 128kbps, but quality starts degrading rapidly below 128kbps. If size restrictions aren’t a huge issue, MP3-CD players are a good deal. They support 700MB of storage space per CD, which is generally more than enough for most people.
Well i have run out of room on my 10GIG player,so everyone has different needs on this issue.
Whatever you do stay away from the RCA Lyra,that piece of junk doesn’t even play mp3s but some propietary format which you have to convert to first.
I think you’ve made a wise decision. iPod is the only way to go.
I have heard that iPods HD can’t be directly copied to,you must go through software.
This true?
You’ve got that right.
Also consider that you can easily, and often, replace the 16 songs with 16 new songs every time you have access to your PC. If you do this daily, you have about 16 songs a day. Weigh this inconvinience against the price difference for more memory. Make your decision.
I have a 20 gig MP3 player that also plays video files. I have about 10 gigs of MP3s on it, and about 10 hours of video, with several gigs left over. Whee!
Technically not true.
The storage is (normally) in the form of FLASH, which is a kind of EEPROM. (Electrically Eraseable Programmeable Read Only Memory). There might be instances where the storage is in the form of battery backed RAM, but that is by all means not the common setup.
However, there is also some RAM built-in in the decoder, and I believe that it was this that Brian was talking about. (That’s only the scratch-pad working memory for the DSP, and I don’t think that it would be anywhere near 32 Mb in a normal setup, but that might well be wrong.) (For a datasheeet of a mp3 decoding chip, look here - this one has a buffer memory of a few kbs.)
When it comes to storage, it might be worthwile to get something that uses the same kind of storage solution as other digital toys you might have. Personally I’ma great fan of Compact Flash, and I use them in my camera, as well as my PDA and an mp3 player. They are a bit larger than SmartMedia / SD / MMC, but to me it’s worth it, as I have a few large cards that I can use for storing audio on a daily basis, as well as taking pictures to when I go on a long vacation. And CF is (right now at least) much cheaper per Mb. Another thing to consider is expandability. There are now rather large CF cards (I have read about 3Gb cards), whereas MMC and the original memory-sticks seem to be limited at 128Mb.
I have one of the MTV-branded mp3 players. It has 256 MB with expansion for 2 64 MB smart cards. It holds about 4+ albums with one addtional smart card.
What is this smart card? Do you mean smart media, or is this yet another media format to add to the list?
(As if there aren’t enough allready.)
(And in that case, it’s a pretty stupid name. To me ‘smart card’ means a credit-card sized card with an embedded chip, such as often used for phone cards / electronic wallets / identification.)
Ipod isn’t the only one on the market for the gig drives. I use an Archos 10 gigger. I have about 100 hours of music on it and still have 4 gigs that are still usable. It also doubles as an USB hard drive and more than worth the money I put into it. It is a little smaller than a cassette walkman and I can carry it in my front jean’s pockets. I bought it for 150-200 bucks new at ComUSA.
As for smart cards, the ones I have seen look like the media cards that digital cameras use. It would be like the embedded chip in the credit card unto itself.