COPYRIGHT 2007 Australian Consumers' Association
They've become an almost essential accessory for those who like to take their music with them. But there's a lot more you can do with some of the digital music players (often called MP3 players after a common type of digital file) in our latest test. You can use them to store photos you take while on holiday, if you run out of room in your camera. To watch a movie, if the screen size allows. To store and transport datafiles, say from your workplace to home, much like you'd use a USB drive. And, of course, to store and play back large amounts of music in digital format.
If you're a novice with digital music, see our article in CHOICE, April 2006, for detailed information, or go to www.choiceextra.com.au and click on Apr 06 under 'digital music'. Briefly, though, to transfer your CDs onto a digital music player, you have to copy ('rip') them onto your computer and encode them before you can transfer them to the player--a process made legal just late last year. You can also download music directly from a legal music website or download audio broadcasts (podcasts).
Memory matters
Players using flash memory use no moving parts to store your music (and data)--it's stored on a memory chip. This means they tend to be smaller and lighter than models with a hard drive, but they also hold fewer songs --roughly 500 can be stored on the flash players in this test (all with 2 GB memory).
Players with a hard disc drive, on the other hand, have greater capacity so you can store much more music, transport large files, etc.
Weight, size and shape
The MP3 players in our latest test--both flash and hard disc players--come in lots of different shapes and sizes. If you want one to carry around, a traditionally shaped, rectangular player is easily slipped into a pocket, especially if it's thin and relatively lightweight like the APPLE iPod Nano, SAMSUNG YP-Z5FQB Or CREATIVE Zen Neeon 2.
Although it's pretty small, you wouldn't want to carry the top-scoring IRIVERT10 around with you all day in a shirt pocket or stuck in your jeans' waistband, because of its unusually bulky shape.
The SONY NW-E005F, looking a bit like a USB key, is incredibly small and weighs just 25 g, the lightest in the test (see the photo, below). It's probably the best of the lot to take jogging or to the gym, but no good if you're looking for larger, easy-to-use controls or a bigger screen to watch movies on. For that sort of thing, you're better off with a hard disc player with a larger screen. The largest screen of the hard disc players in the test belongs to the COWON A2. It looks eminently suitable for displaying photos or watching movies, but comes at a price: $699, the most expensive in the test and the heaviest by far.
At the other end...
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-30069339_ITM
