MP3 Recommendation - Gear - Runner's World

Steve McCarthy

31/10/2002 at 10:41

Hi,

Im thinking about buying an MP3 player for use when running. Can anyone recommend a decent player upto £150.

Steve

Trickle

31/10/2002 at 12:40

I've just bought an mpio dmk128 - I got it from ebay but you can get it for £150 from www.ihavetohave.it. It has 128Mb (2 hours music?) and is about the size of a lipstick holder/cigarette lighter - 30g. Seems v. easy and quick to upload music to it.
Got it about two days ago and am taking it for its first run today - I'll probably have to use different headphones though since the little earphones provided, although good quality, fall out when I jog with it.
V. pleased with it so far.

Trickle

Karaoke Pacer

31/10/2002 at 13:07

Steve,

I've had a Compaq IPAQ for several months and I love it.

It cost me £140 (duty free at Gatwick) but I'm sure you can get it even cheaper than that on Internet.

It works on multimedia cards and is thus very small and light. The belt clip is very secure and will not bounce off if attached to your shorts.

No problems ripping and downloading (uses Musicmatch -supplied- to connect to your PC).

Takes 2 X 64 MB cards at a time and has an open slot if you can afford lots of extra memory cards (about £50 each at the moment, so I just have the two). But two cards will give you about 3hours of music. You just have to change playlists now and again for some variety.

Quality of the sound is great.

Fantastic feelin to have skip free music at any pace.

I would highly recomend this one.

Hope this helps

Steve McCarthy

31/10/2002 at 14:28

Thanks guys. Certainly some food for thought. I would probably sway towards the mpio purely because of the size of it.

thanks for the advce!

Karaoke Pacer

31/10/2002 at 16:44

Yes, I considered the mpio and if expandable memory wasn't important to me I may have chosen it. It also got good reviews on the web.

Enjoy whatever you choose

the man mandelson couldn't silence

31/10/2002 at 17:49

Steve,
Don't know if you can stretch to 229 quid but if you can, the Apple iPod is a thing of great beauty and the 5Gb model will store an incredible 1000 songs on it. They also do a 10Gb (2,000 songs) and a 20Gb (4,000). I'm thinking of buying one having seen and heard it recently. Seems to get brilliant reviews and is tiny (about the size of a pack of cards. It's expensive but it really is cutting edge technology and design and will make all your friends deeply envious. Sadly I don't think it makes you run better

PS I haven't got one . . . yet but sant is on his way

Colin Biggs

31/10/2002 at 18:45

Steve
I got an RCA Kazoo i bought it in Florida for about £60. I get about an hour of music on it, you can also buy a smartmedia card to boost up the memory so youll get even longer. I have 64MB of internal memory.

Hope this helps.

Karaoke Pacer

31/10/2002 at 19:59

Editor,

Do you need an Apple Mac Computer to download songs onto the iPOD? or can you use any PC?

What does it weigh with that amount of hard drive memory?

It does sound the ultimate (if anything ever happened to my Compaq - God forbid because I love the thing) if the above are not problems.

cheers

Karaoke Pacer

31/10/2002 at 20:01

Ed,

Sorry forgot to ask if you know what the battery life is like on the iPOD. Does powering a hard drive eat up the juice?

thanks

David Stewart 2

01/11/2002 at 16:44

I bought the MPIO and bought it specifically for running. I have to say it is an excellent product and I wouldn't recommend less than 128mb if you are running 6m+.

NEGATIVES
As Trickle says the supplied headphones are totally useless.
I'm not convinced about it's waterproofness and fear it is a fair-weather tool
The flap covering the USB connection point is a little delicate.
I'm not convinced the sound is loud enough - I could be going deaf - or it could be a PC setting but I'd prefer beefing up the volume a little on some tracks

POSITIVES
Very light - hardly noticeable when running.
Supplied belt clip is excellent - clear plastic and very strong - didn't use the arm strap
Song upload quick and easy
Battery life good

Hope this helps.

David

4:01 Loon (Dammit!!!)

01/11/2002 at 20:19

Hi folks... I've recently bought a Nike Rio (Sports Audio) 64mb player. Comes with a waist belt clip and also an arm band, which is great for use whilst running. The headphones are runner friendly too. Stores about 1.5 hours CD quality music or more if you reduce the quality slightly - I can't tell the difference myself! Over five hours of battery use of 1 AA battery too!I bought my player through e-bay for £85.00 although they retail for a lor more in the shops.

the man mandelson couldn't silence

02/11/2002 at 21:30

Sorry for slow response about Apple iPod. They do work best with an Apple computers running the iTunes software (quite brilliant) but they now do a PC version (same prices) which I'm told by a PC savvy friend is excellent.
It's very light and there is no problem with battery life unless you go out and run 100 miles at a time

Karaoke Pacer

02/11/2002 at 23:24

thanks Ed.
Will bear this one in mind if I drop and run over my Compaq.

Seem to be some good mp3 players about.

cheers

frog

03/11/2002 at 11:20

I'm looking for a small mp3 player also, I reckon I'm gonna send off for the Kiiro CA128S from Amazon as it's 128 MB and down to under £100... And it's tiny. There is a page of reviews at http://www.reviewcentre.com/items18.php3

XFR Bear

03/11/2002 at 12:07

Frog - be interested to hear what you think of it - I'm on the lookout for an MP3 player too :o)

frog

03/11/2002 at 20:51

Ordered it earlier - It said 1 to 2 weeks... I hope its closer to 1 :)

I'll try and post back with my views...

Mr A

05/11/2002 at 14:55

OK, so having read all of this, I now have a really dumb question. I'm not an IT person, so please bear with me....

All these MP3 players, am I right in thinking that you can only "download"(?) music onto them from your PC? ie if the only PC I have access to is my work laptop, which doesn't like MP3s, then an MP3 player is useless to me? You can't, say, hook a CD player up to them to record music onto them???

Like I say, it's probably a dumb question, but I'm a bit behind the times!

frog

05/11/2002 at 15:29

I think some mp3 players WILL allow direct recording from CD, but not most, and not the cheaper ones.
But if you have a laptop, then you *can* download mp3's to any mp3 player, generally provided it runs a version of windows, or the player specifically supports the Apple Mac.
Is the reason your work PC doesn't like mp3's a restriction laid down by the company, or is it just not configured to play them? If its not to do with company policy, you can download free software that will rip(convert) your cd's and create mp3s. Provided of course you have a usb port, and a cd drive, and are NOT running Windows NT (which doesn't support usb).
But seriously I wouldn't even think of buying an mp3 player unless I had my own PC, as changing tracks would be too much of a bind. Even if you find one of the ones that WILL allow cd to mp3 recording, that would mean real time transfer speeds whenever you wanted a change...ugh.

Mr A

05/11/2002 at 15:35

Unfortunately, it's down to company policy. B*gger.

frog

05/11/2002 at 15:51

:/

To be honest looking around I can't actually find one that records from cd directly (I'm sure I saw one in T3 or something), but if you're after something small and reasonably jog-proof, the latest minidisc players are supposed to be pretty good. Mine skips unfortunately, that's why I have just gone the mp3 route...