Hi,
I purchased a cheapy mp3 player to go with me on a trip. Firmware version
STD V1.1 -looks like a Ipod shuffle with a small blue LCD. I just wanted something small that could play music so I don’t rip my hair out flying overseas with a 2 year old.
The player doesn’t come with any on-board memory, so a Micro SD card must be purchased. I was told it could handle up to a 8GB card, so this is what I purchased (Class2).
So I load some music on this and it starts playing and I’m bouncin and then the music starts to slow down and distort - which never happened on my computer -I thought maybe the file got corrupted in the transfer but when I play the music on the card inside the player via USB cable to my computer the music plays fine.
I’m an audiophile, I like high quality music mos-t of what I have is 320Kbps bit-rate -so I got to thinking, maybe the buffer in this thing is just overwhelmed by the amount of data that has to pump through it all at once and that is causing the distortion.
Which leads me to the thinking there only 2 options left (well 3 if you count finding a better firmware upgrade for this, but what’s the chance of me finding that?)
So 2 choices -this is where I need help. I found a song I liked and made it 128kbps bit-rate the song plays fine -but that’s still a problem- I want to just dump my music on here, not down-grade everything I have to 128kbps bit-rate.
My question is, will it make a difference if the Class 2 micro SD card I got was , say- a Class 6 Micros SD card? Would that allow my player to read songs at 320 kbps bit-rate quickly enough or is the problem that the buffer(hardware) in the device is the bottleneck and it just won’t allow more information through at one time?
Class 2 should be 2MB/s. I don’t know if that is the theoretical maximum or if they account for any overhead. But, it’s under ideal conditions. So, with a new card, freshly formatted you are pretty close to ideal.
I have seen digital camera tests where they benchmark the read/write speeds of cards and not all perform the same. Some will have a decent burst rate, which maybe what you are experiencing, but then drop of dramatically. But, still, a Class 2 should sustain that 2Mb/s speed and your 320kb/s is a fraction of that.
Probably the el cheapo MP3 player.
Try 256kb/s. Or, go all out and do 128, 192, 256 and see where it craps out.
Doesn’t solve the problem of transcoding all your music though.
A Class 2 SD card, as electronbee points out, is theoretically 50 times faster than 320kb/s MP3 file. Unless it’s a completely crappy, counterfeit card, it’s probably not the culprit.
Are only certain songs problematic?
Are they perhaps encoded with VBR (variable bit rate) or a non-standard bitrate? Some cheaper players have trouble with that.
Well, I downloaded another song, -in fact the exact song that is having the biggest problem in my player at 320 bitrate to 128 bitrate and it plays 99% perfect.
My guess is that there’s too much information happening at certain points in the song (ie the “burst” term previously mentioned) … ever notice how on certain CDs the intro of a song will be loud and have maybe one or two instruments and then 20 seconds into it the vocals, the backtracks, the bass, the sound FX all come in at once and the volume drops? -It’s my analogy - same concept I believe. (although maybe not because I think what I’m referring to in that case is compression -but you get the idea ;))
When the chorus gets going and the beat kicks up more + the original singer then all hell breaks loose inside my player and it becomes painfully choked-up and basically unresponsive until it works through the rough patch and is playing again, then you get your control back and you can switch songs or what-have-you.
If you have a modern computer, transcoding doesn’t take much time at all–I know it takes less than 30 seconds for a 30 minute MP3 on my dad’s eMachine bought this year.
So my suggestion would be to get some sort of MP3 transcoding software with a drag and drop interface–one that lets you set the output directory. I found this rather simple one. Right click to change settings.
Oh, and it’s likely the cheapo MP3 player just isn’t decoding fast enough: the processor is probably optimized for lower bitrate MP3s. I’ve run into that before–I convert all my 320K MP3s to the highest quality VBR instead, and they work fine.
Ok, I just thought I’d update this since it really is m-y obligation to get a solution that works best .
I never question Chinese electronics being that most of them in this country come from there and probably from the same block in China with different logos stamped on them. Ipod is no different- just more proprietary. Being of such a mind-set (and living in a country with a very good return policy didn’t hurt either) I decided to take the chance and upgrade my micro SD card… same size but for a few bucks more at Best Buy I found a class 10 card… I knew it was overkill, but I also knew if thi-s didn’t do it, nothin’ was gonna.
Got that little guy home and copied my “problem mp3” from the player to the computer and then back to the new card and >poof< l i g ht - y e a r s of difference… I had to look again at the bitrate on the player to indeed confirm it was playing my song at 320 kbps bit rate and yeah… mhmm checks out… So, what can I say?, this time around throwing money at the problem fixed my issue -being a technician sometimes has it’s perks -I’m just glad that having only one fix to my problem left available to me -it was the fix I needed to be a happy audiophile - it saves me alot of batch processing as well
