MP3 players; which one?

[Dirk Gently]

I'd like some help if possible. I want to buy an MP3 player that is easy to use, but i need to know mow much it can hold...& not in a Gb way either.
I'd like to put on several discs & I need to know how much time different players can hold. The CDs have different track lengths but all run to about 65 minutes or there abouts.
Does anyone have any idea how time translates in to Gb?
I'm thinking that I'll need 4 Gb or bigger but I have no idea if that'll be enough or way too much.

[Paul Clement]

A 4gb MP3 player can usually store around 1000 tracks. Assuming that each song is about 4 - 5 minutes long, that's 4000-5000 minutes which equates to 66 to 83 hours. Probably nearer the 66. Of course, you'll probably only have about 25 hours battery life.

[Dirk Gently]

Cheers, Paul.
Ah, I need a bigger one than 4Gb then. That's going to be expensive.

[Paul Clement]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-ZEN...3769780&sr=8-9

This one is a 4gb that allegedley holds up to 2000 tracks. £65.99 sounds pretty reasonable too.

[Dirk Gently]

You see, that's what confuses me; 2000 tracks, at what length!?
I need to know how much time.
Also I just did a quick bit of maths & it looks like I'll need it to hold 7500+ minutes...which is a lot.

[Jon Masters]

I think to some extent it also depends upon what quality the sound is transferred at - for lots of things I record off iPlayer using Audacity, by switching the bit rate from 128kB per sec to 64, you halve the size of the files and so they take up half as much room. My old ears can't really detect much of a difference in the sound quality. I think if you rip CDs with Real Player it lest you set the bit rate.

I have only a 1GB mp3, but at one point it had least 5 full BF stories, half a dozen 45 minutes Sherlock Holmes plays and 4 or 5 music albums and was still only about 75% full.

[Dirk Gently]

Well it's all spoken word primarily, but it's over 125 hrs worth.

[Lissa]

for lots of things I record off iPlayer using Audacity

If you're recording radio (as opposed to the sound from TV programmes) then I heartily recommend "Radio Downloader" which downloads the tracks directly from the iPlayer and converts them to MP3.

As for file size, at 160kps your average 4 part Big Finish play comes in at about 125 megabytes which makes it about 70 megabytes per hour. If you reduce your bitrate to 64kps then you'll need about 30 megabytes per hour of audio.

[Dirk Gently]

Thanks very much, Lissa.
That works out at about 3.66 Gig @ 30 megabytes & 8.54 Gig @ 70 megabytes required.
Quick question, can you mix transfer rates? I.E can you download a couple of Cd's @ one speed & then the rest @ another. (My assumption would be yes but I'm not taking any chances on assumptions).

[Lissa]

You might have problems if you pick a strange bitrate but if you stick to the presets you'll be fine. I'd recommend iTunes if you're ripping CDs as it lets you join tracks together so you can have one file per episode instead of a dozen or so per episode.

[Philipnet]

Quick question, can you mix transfer rates? I.E can you download a couple of Cd's @ one speed & then the rest @ another. (My assumption would be yes but I'm not taking any chances on assumptions).

Yes.

When/if converting to MP3, choose the settings from the drop-down list in the software rather than typing in any numbers yourself.

FYI: For true spoken-word audio my preferred settings are variable bit-rate at 64kbit/s and in mono. You get really small files and the audio quality is good enough that you don't hear any 'artefacts' in the sound.

[Dirk Gently]

Thanks for all the info everyone. It looks like a 4 gig player @ transfer rate of 64kbs.
Does anyone know how much bigger the audio files would be in stereo instead of mono?

[Zbigniev Hamson]

The file size depends on the bitrate, not whether its stereo or mono. However, a 64kbs stereo file will sound worse than a 64kbs mono track because each channel is then only 32kbs. 64kbs mono tracks can still be 44,100 Hz, which is CD "quality" (in terms of frequency resolution at least), whereas I believe you can only have around 24,000 Hz maximum for a stereo 64kbs file*. You lose all the top end frequencies, and it makes it sound a bit like AM radio, which I think is the most noticeable aspect of the low quality, moreso than the artefacts.

For decent sounding stereo music, 128kbs is about as low as you want to go, as you can maintain a CD quality (i.e. human ear quality) frequency response. That's 16 kB per second, or very nearly 1 MB per minute, which is a nice round handy number to remember. At that bitrate a 1-hour CD comes in at about 60 MB, and you would get about 69 discs that length on a 4GB player. If you go for 256kbs mp3 you would only get about 35. Etc etc.

Of course, you have to be careful how they are defining GB in the first place. A lot of mp3 players and external drive manufacturers like to define a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas a real GB (as you would see in Windows for example) is 1,073,741,824 bytes, which is more than 7% larger. In other words a "4 GB" player might well only be about 3.7GB in reality. Of course, the larger you go, the more noticeable the discrepancy.

(*this might just be a limitation of the encoding software I've used, but I've never encountered a 64kbs or less stereo mp3 which is at 41,000Hz)