Portable MP3 Players without propriety?

[Deathblow]

Who here has an portable MP3 player? You ever notice that almost all of the MP3 players produced are geared to use this pirating protection software that will only allow you to play files with certain signitures, and download music from certain sites with certain file permissions?

I hate that...errr... for reasons that I refuse to elaborate on.

I'm looking for an portable MP3 players that doesn't use that "signiture" or propriety or "file permission"... anyone got any suggestions?

[Deathblow]

Ok, if you must know why i need a portable that does't restrict itself to "authorized files" its because a friend audiorecorded some lectures from class as MP3s and I want to listen to them while I'm not at my computer, but I can't find anything to play the lectures with. :hmm:

EDITed for clarity.

[Bort]

This may seem like a stupid question, but couldn't you simply get a copy of the tapes from your friend and buy a small tape player?

[Deathblow]

they are saved as mp3 files, he doesn't have cassett tapes of them... actually, he wasn't the person that recorded them, he got them from a friend that got them from a friend that got them from a friend... that sort of thing...

[lesrae]

I use a very basic 128Mb MP3 player, available for £15 or so from the local supermarket. It's got no bells or whistles, but it plays MP3s through a set of headphones which is all I need. If I want fancy one day then I'll paint the headphones white :O)

[werauchimmer]

It does NOT matter if a MP3 Player is DRM enabled, as long as the files are not restricted. In other words: As long as your "friend" does not restrict the MP3 files from the "lectures" (Funny excuse, really.) he took, you can play them on any MP3 player, be it an IPod, a Zen or a noname product. If you do not need a large HDD player, cheap stick format ones can be bought online for a few dollars with 256MB Flash memory, ought to be enough for voice records :roll:

[JJ]

Yep, the files must not be restricted. I've got a 1GB Creative Muvo-player myself and it plays all the mp3's whether they're downloaded or ripped from my own cd's. It holds up a decent amount of music. Most of my stuff is 192kbps and I can shove some 13 to 14 hours worth of music in it.

[SUBMAN1]

Find one that supports OGG Vorbis (iRiver is an example) and I'll give you a compression algorythm/codec that is near lossless (MP3 for example is very lossy) yet still keeps a good file size. It does this by not putting a restiction on the bitrate, so while it is trying to maintain 212 kbps or less, it will sometimes shoot to 500 to 600 kbps to maintain quality for the highs in a song. If you use this, you will not be able to tell the difference between the original CD and the compressed version (outside of the db loss or quality loss caused by the player itself or your soundcard on your computer).

The players say they max out at 320 kbps, which is fine because they are not floating point based but are instead integer based. This will not affect the playback of a speically encodded ogg file however, so don't worry about it. It is rare that it will need to exceed 300 kbps anyway.

Typical file size over a standard MP3 recorded at 192 kbps will be nearly equal most of the time since it doesn't have a low end restriction either - meaning it will drop to 0 kbps if it can get away with it. Worst case however, add 5% to the file size.

VBR MP3's and standard encoded ogg's do their best to maintain a constant bitrate, even though all ogg (Or most at least) are encoded at a varible bitrate - they will still maintain somehwere close to your desired bitrate at all costs - this is done with streaming in mind. My specially tuned version however ignores this limitation which is why the major increase in quality without much (if any!) increase in file size.

-S