Steven Hanley
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Mon, 20 Feb 2006
Commodity mp3 players - 18:18
Before the 2004 24 Hour race I decided to buy an mp3 player (in case I found I
wanted some music while doing laps around 3am). I found I was never
particularly interested in the distraction of music while riding. However I
still have the mp3 player. A
Frontier Labs Nex IA,
this fit with my requirements of, solid state (compact flash or similar) and
uses removable (AA in this case) batteries. Both points mean I was less
likely to damage a spinning hard disk when using it in rough environments and
if the batteries ran out I simply popped a few more in I did not need to be
near a power point to recharge it. I paid around AUD $150 for the unit at the
time (September 2004) and have since bought a few large CF cards to have a
variety of music hot swappable.
Today I was in Jaycar and saw a player that satisfies the above requirements,
the cost was AUD $31. It uses SD/MMC as media and takes a single AAA battery,
mp3 players really are commodity items now days. It comes with earplugs (which
cost around AUD $20 miniimum in shops anyway), a AAA battery, a neck strap and
a usb connection cable. You can buy 512 MB SD cards for AUD $60 if you know
where to shop.
Admittedly this device does not have fm radio or display track names or make
navigation easy (ie no folders and directories which the mp3 player my sister
has now does allow, though hers does not have a removable battery) so it is
somewhat like an Apple Shuffle in this case (the lcd display simply shows
track number and time in the track).
[/comp/hardware]
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