A big thanks go to Bill Door for his invaluable advice regarding the subject of mp3 player capacity and file sizes.
You see I've been labouring under the misaprehension that the mp3 file format was any good. But it isn't. It's old, flaky and takes up way too much room. There are much better options around.
Both my mp3 players support Microsoft's WMA format. And while the sort of saddo who types M$ instead of MS may scoff, the fact is that it's an excellent format. I've just done a listening test and a 64kbps WMA file sounded just as good on my iRiver Clix 2 as a 192kbps mp3 file. That's the same sound with a file a third of a size.
You can see where I'm going with this can't you?
That means my need for music player capacity falls dramatically. I don't need some 60GB behemoth. I'm sure a 32GB player would hold my complete CD collection at that kind of low WMA bitrate.
Right now all my ripped music in 192kbps mp3 form (which only amounts to 10GB so far) is being converted to WMA 64kbps by Windows Media Player as it copies across to my Clix 2. And you know what, the whole lot will fit on there leaving nearly 1GB of space. Excellent.
Bill has also suggested ripping my CDs in WMA Lossless format. These are big files - some 400MB per CD. But it means you have a sonicly perfect copy of the music on your hard drive.
You can then choose which rate to copy to your portable device and it will be converted as it is copied. The beauty of doing this is that you only have to rip your CD collection once and when you get larger capacity players in the future you can just up the quality of the files you allow the PC to copy over, starting from a perfect original.
So right now I'm in less of a hurry for a new mp3 (will have to stop calling it that) until I know how big my CD collection will be when ripped.
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