My mp3 Player

What is an mp3 player?

Really, it is a minicomputer. The main feature is a hard disk drive. My Toshiba Gigabeat F40 is a little larger than a packet of cigarettes and contains a 40-gigabyte disk drive, which can hold as many as 300-600 CDs of music in the compressed, lossy mp3 format, depending on exactly what degree of compression you use.

It has a small screen and various input and output sockets to connect it to headphones, an amplifier, a personal computer, or an electricity supply. It has some controls that duplicate various features of a mouse so that you can make choices,

It also contains some specialized software that will display the contents of your disk drive, convert music files into a signal, and maybe display photographs, or even video.

The software that came with my Toshiba gigabeat is not as good as I would like. It displays the music according to the ID-3 tags attached to music files and you cannot design your own system of menus. It can do useless things like alpabetically displaying a list of 4000 songs on a two inch LCD screen.

Fortunately I soon discovered the open-source Rockbox firmware (operating system) for mp3 players, which is a free download and works with my Toshiba Gigabeat and also with Apple i-Pods and some other makes of player.

This firmware has some huge advantages. It allows you to use your player exactly like an external hard disk drive to your personal computer. When you display your music in Files View, you seen the names of folders displayed just like on the hard drive of your PC. This means that by naming folders, you can easily design your own menus. With music, tyically, the name of the musician, e.g. Louis Armstrong, is a high level folder name, then the names of albums are lower level folder names, and the songs, of course, are individual files.

For example when I turn on my player, the first screen looks something like this:

1.Jazz
2.Blues
3.Musical Theater
4.Podcasts
5.Photographs

When I click on 1. Jazz, I move to another screen that says:

1.Big Band
2.Small groups.
3.Singers

By designing a hierarchy of folders, you can arrange your music in menus like this any way you like and never have more more choices than will fit on the screen, which makes it much easier to use than the original software.

Another big advantage is that the Rockbox firmware will also play FLAC files. FLAC is an open source format for lossless compression that provides superior playback. You can rip your CDs to FLAC format using Winamp (another free program). My 40-gigabyte player can hold about 120 CDs of music in this lossless format in which the playback is as good as the original CD. In effect you have a perfect copy of the original CD.

Rockbox has numerous other advantageous features, but the two I have mentioned are the most important to me.

Once you have your mp3 player loaded you can use it in your car, at work, at home, or any place you go, especially if you can stand headphones. It really makes the original CDs and possession of a CD player other than a PC drive redundant.

Click here for Best 40 CDs list.