MP3

Today, Diamond Geezer’s writing about his new iPod Shuffle. I do kind of like the idea of the Shuffle, but the two main ‘selling points’ are the ones that would irritate me the most. No display, and an enforced random play. I like having the option to go through tracks randomly, but sometimes I want to just listen to the album straight through. And no display annoys the tits off me, and would do so even more with added random play.

My first ‘stick’ MP3 player was a 128Mb Phillips ‘wearable’ MP3 player (hey, they called it that, I didn’t) which didn’t have a display, and also had the bloody annoying habit of resetting itself to the start of the list of tracks for no good reason. But the 128Mb was enough to suffice for what I wanted – two or three albums worth, and no joggling or blipping when on the move. But it also had no display, and that bugged me after a while – I wanted to know what was playing, or whether it’d decided to reset back to the start, or what would come next. This was obviously a regular complaint about the product, as I notice that the latest one has a display on it.

Unfortunately, that one had a kind of canine-related accident. In other words I’d left it in the USB port on the computer (it also charged up via USB, which was kind of handy on occasion) and the dog’s wagging tail knocked it out, slightly knacking the USB plug. Ooops. So I ended up buying an iRiver 256Mb stick. It’s got a display, which is nice. I can choose whether I want to play sequentially, or randomly through an album, a selection, or through the entire 256Mb. It can also record and encode MP3 on the fly through an onboard microphone, or from the built-in radio. Well, it would if the radio function weren’t utterly shit. But recording line-in or through the microphone isn’t bad at all. It also gets about 40 hours of playback from one AA battery.

I don’t need a huge memory on the stick – yeah, sure, I could have bought the one with 1Gb of memory, but I wouldn’t have really utilised it. 256Mb holds six or seven albums, which is fine for a couple of days of walking to work, working, going to the gym, etc. Then I just wipe what’s on it and start again. Suits me fine.

Having the display is – for me – far better. I can navigate easily through the file structure to find the album I want without it turning into a nightmare of guesswork. (How many tracks on that album? How many keypresses will it register for skipping through the tracks?) The iRiver suits my needs – particularly now I’ve got the sound equaliser sorted, and at decent volume the bass comes through beautifully. And Pressure Drop’s “Food for Love” and “Elusive” albums illustrate that perfectly. But more about those – and some of the other music going through it – at some other point.