Originally posted by Apologist4Him
Originally posted by py3ak
Thanks, Fred. Does anyone know if walmart.com or any other online store lowers its prices on the vari-colored Friday?
Also, does anyone know about how many minutes/hours of music you get for what storage size?
I recommend comparing prices at various places...amazon.com, buy.com, walmart.com, bestbuy.com, etc.
http://www.newegg.com/ is my favorite online store for purchasing computer products. I sometimes use
http://www.pricewatch.com/ just to get an idea of what the "bottom price" is.
Ok, now for a primer on minutes/hours and storage size...
256 Megabytes is the bottom of the barrel, 512 Megabytes is the next step up...
From there the size goes up to a Gigabyte. There are 1,000 Megabytes in 1 Gigabyte. I think you'll want a player with at least a Gigabyte or two of storage, especially if you plan on transfering very many sermons or lectures which can eat even a gig pretty quick.
The top two brands are Apple and Creative. I recommend a Creative player because you get "more bang for your buck". I recommend reading reviews. If you want to check out Creative's current selection of MP3 players, go here:
http://www.creative.com/products/mp3/
I use an 'old' Creative Nomad Jukebox 2Lx with 20 Gigabytes of storage. I've used it at work for quite awhile now. It's only given me a problem one time (I had to manually wipe the hard drive clean), but it had to do with the Nomad Explorer software I used to transfer files to the player. I went back to using Creative Media Source Organizer, and havn't had any problem.
One last thing should be noted, some MP3 players sound better than others, and the Creative player I use sounds great, however, I cannot play files encoded at 16 kbps 11 khz, which is fine with me, because that bit rate leaves much to be desired so far as quality is concerned, and the only format I know of which compresses files at that bit rate and can sound descent is the realaudio format, and I do not know of any player which can play realaudio files. I can't stand the metallic echo commonly found in low bit rate audio files. 40 - 64 VBR is about as low as I go, and that, only if the source is poor quality. I encode the Ligonier Ministries audio CD's I purchase at 128 kbps for my player. I wouldn't encode them any less than 64 VBR (that's variable bit rate, as opposed to CBR constant bit rate).
[Edited on 11-10-2005 by Apologist4Him]
