At Home with John and Debbie

It’s got warm enough to tackle some jogging. I have a lovely new iPod, but by going for capacity rather than compactness, it pulls my shorts down as I run. I don’t run for long, so I don’t need my whole collection on-tap. Something like an iPod Shuffle would fit the bill, but I think they’re overpriced.

Debbie was going to Tesco, and I asked her to get me the cheapest no-name MP3 player in the shop. She brought me a 512MB MP3-player-in-a-USB-stick, for under £10.

The twist closure is an improvisation, to fix it to my belt loop. It may well end up being permanent. It’s small and light enough that its weight isn’t noticeable. It runs on a replaceable AAA battery.

Putting on music is just a matter of plugging it in, and copying MP3 files to the filesystem that that appears. Directories are treated as albums, when it comes to playing order. It works just as well on a Mac as on a PC. There’s an abominable generic trance track supplied on it. It’s been deleted now. There was a mini CD of software. I haven’t used it.

All you can do is play, pause, skip forward or backward a track at a time, and adjust the volume. The volume and sound quality were perfectly fine, loud enough to be audible over traffic, not noticeably tinny or distorted.

All in all: great success. I wouldn’t have minded a shuffle option.

Update: Now I come to think of it, since it plays in alphabetical order, it ought to be pretty simple to shuffle the play order before leaving the house, by having a program prepend a couple of digits to each track’s filename, in a random order. The key to getting on with this player is not to expect to control it much on the fly.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 13:46 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.