mp3-cd players

I was looking for CD players for quite a while until I ended up looking for mini-cd players. They all have 185-210 megs each CD, depending on which you buy, and MP3 encodes at about a meg a minute, so that ends up at 185-210 minutes of music. One reviewer said that they couldn't rip his own songs and put them on, which means he was probably just stupid, because after they're ripped MP3's are all the same, so I don't know what they were thinking. They also said the battery life was only 4 hours, which is also untrue, because I use rechargeable batteries which don't have as long a life as normal batteries and I still get about 8-10 hours of battery life. With normal batteries I get 10-12 hours. One reviewer talked about a click at the end of the tracks, but I didn't find that annoying. I usually listen to my songs at a low volume and didn't even notice it until I went and read these reviews, so I turned the volume all the way up and did hear it, but it isn't loud or anything. The CD player is about 4 inches wide, 4 inches tall, and 1 inch thick. The biggest problem is the thickness, but it still fits into the pockets of all of my pants. I was happy to find that the buttons are designed so that the buttons aren't pushed while it's in your pocket or bag or something. The buttons are still big, and the interface is fairly simple and easy to use. I put MP3's in between 48 and 192 kbps and all of them worked. It loads up very quickly, only about 10 seconds with a new CD. The skip protection is good, if longer then 2 minutes it spins for about 16 seconds while it's playing and then stops spinnin, and then after 2 minutes spins for another few seconds during play. The headphones are good quality, but mine went faulty from not taking care of them very well. It's pretty well built, since I'm rough with all my things, and I have little brothers and sisters that get into it and drop it and whatever else they want to do to ruin my life, and it still works fine.

After researching mp3 players, reading customer reviews, and watching the net for new models over quite a few months, I was prepared to be somewhat disappointed. Perhaps because of this, I did not want to spend a lot of money. I am completely SATISFIED and HAPPY with the Memorex MPD8081. This is my first mp3 player. My player's main function is to let me listen to music without having to run the whole computer. It's connected to my Monsoon MM-702 computer speakers and the combination sounds GREAT!

Mini CD's give you the best compromise between low cost, portability, and compatibility with the most widely available devices. This player plays mp3 format files and normal CD-DA (wav files, red book, whatever) only. If there are any mp3 files on a disk, wav files will be ignored. Disks snap onto a spindle which holds them the way a ratchet holds a socket. There is no backlight and the headphone jack does double-duty as the line output. A dial on the side regulates volume and a small switch controls dynamic bass boost. The only other side-mounted control is the sliding latch for the spring-loaded cover. Overall construction is high quality. On my unit, two small places on the side where friction inside the packaging scraped away the paint--very minor.

Comes with street style headphones and three blank 210 MB mini CDs. If you use headphones you will probably want another pair. The non-adjustable headphones included may be adequate for some folks. Sound is good and noise level in the electronics is quite low. No specs are given. No software is included. There is a 4.5V input in back but no included AC adaptor. The unit powers ON via the play button on top and OFF via the stop button pressed twice. Turns off after one minute of inactivity to conserve power. No batteries are included.

Controls are simple, the manual is clear, functions are intuitive and the unit behaves flawlessly. Mp3 format is the only supported format; the manual says up to 384 Kbps. Also says packet writing and multi-session are supported. I have not tested all of these. I've made one CD-R with mp3's in five directories and one CD-RW containing only two wav files. Both work just fine. Random function is quite intelligent--on a mp3 disk all files in a directory are shuffled (no-repeat) and played before moving on to the next directory. You can fast-forward and rewind within a track for either mp3's or wavs. For me, so far, startup time has been very short (6 seconds for 54 songs), but the manual warns that it may take up to 30 seconds on a disk containing many mp3 tracks.

Only caveats you might consider: A previous reviewer was annoyed by the slight click at the end of a song. I was concerned when I read this but I do not find it to be very annoying. Sometimes (not often) a delay between tracks interrupts the "flow" of a recording and that IS annoying. Side topic: don't purchase a bunch of "extra length" 210 MB cd's before testing them with your burner. My first CD-RW burner (Samsung) had trouble using these so I switched to "normal" 185 MB cd's. I have not tested this with my newer burner and I suspect newer drives don't have this problem.

My review would not have been so long if I wasn't very happy about the product. Amazon has treated me very fairly and I praise them. I do, however, believe that product descriptions here and for other items are somewhat lacking. I highly recommend this product.
(original 01-Oct-2002, additional comment 16-Feb-2003)

Addendum
I'm still pretty happy with it, but I might give it only four stars now. I found others comments interesting; you have to wonder about the people who didn't realize it only played mini CD's -- perhaps this speaks to Amazon's sparse product blurb and single picture. The Memorex web site is woefully lacking in product information, as stated by reviewer "gadget_guy". Battery life is decent; get ten hours from alkalines. I would like for the cover to have less free play--it clacks a bit while buttons are being pressed.

I've noticed some annoying sonic 'artifacts' generated by the player's built-in mp3 decoder that do not happen when I listen to the same files with the computer. I'm going to re-encode the problem albums using a different bit rate. (One of them is Peter Gabriel's "melting face" album which is bizare enough without any help from the decoder.) Software tips: I've played around with Easy CD and Nero Burning; I prefer Nero. I made the mistake of purchasing the mp3pro plug-in from ahead for $19. What good is mp3pro when hardly any device supports it? I switched to the free program called CDex for ripping audio from CDs.

Regarding the inter-song gap created by the player: I began to get very annoyed at this so I searched for a way to rip/encode several tracks into a single giant mp3 file. Long story short, CDex can do the job hassle free. (Wasted a lot of time mucking with the wave editor.) If I had the disk "Abbey Road" I would definitely rip/encode the songs into two or three giant files. Still the best mini-CD player around from what I can tell. Yeah, the iPod is cool, but I'd rather have a new motherboard, Pentium 4, DDR-SDRAM, etc.. for the same money.

Works good. But the product is made cheaply. Very delicate product. I was disappointed just in 5 minutes after looking at this player.